I'm entering my mid 20's and I feel completely lost. After I finished high school and then subsequently dropped out of college I've been alone, I wasn't keeping contact with anyone from high school or college, and while everyone was moving forward in life I've been stuck for ~2 years now. Got one short work gig last year, that came and went in a month. Now I'm stuck doing an even worse gig until December, and after that I'll have to try and find anything that might show up in the area that is miserable as shit. All whilst fluctuating between various mental states, from calling myself a worthless waste of life and a disappointment filled with suicidal thoughts to short moments of clarity and motivation to change something about my life for the better, just to have it all crashing down once I can't find a single starting point to work on, and constantly thinking about multiple things at once that I've done wrong in my life, more often than not jumping to failures that I couldn't even begin to rectify or haven't really made yet, just pointlessly going around in circles with no guidance.
I'm not gonna exaggerate if I'm going to say I'm terminally online. I have nothing better to do in my spare time, and at this point I can't tell how much of what I believe about the world and myself is genuine, and how much of it is me getting poisoned by the online world's bitter and cynical twist on it. Whether or not me not accomplishing anything of worth by this age, be it in relationships, education or employment, is actually representative of me being a failure or if it's all yapping of other terminally online idiots that has no correlation in the real world, but because I read it I let it get under my skin and make my current mental state worse. Like being a kissless virgin and an asocial sperg, on some days I take it personally and tell myself I should remove myself from the gene pool like many online say you should, while on others I see that as the type of shit that I've got from the Internet that is a load of bull only meant to demoralize me, that I shouldn't give up and lay down. But it's easy to start believing the bullshit once you're depressed. Even without that, I am so fucked in the head at this point in time that when I see or hear other people being successful, people who have a stable job, family and all that, like my current co-workers, I feel hatred towards myself for not being able to achieve even a modicum of that. But that hatred never gets turned into action to improve myself, it's all self-destructive. I never externalize that hatred though, it just lingers within me as I shut in and get filled with that self-hatred, it's shit. I know that I shouldn't judge myself by comparing my life to lives of other people's, but fuck me if I also don't feel guilt when my older sister managed to accomplish way way more in her life than me. Makes me feel like I've disappointed my mother by not making something out of myself by this point, but even that doesn't give me the kick to do something to make her feel proud of me. Maybe my brain is just permanently broken or I need to suffer some greater mental anguish to turn those emotions into action. I don't know.
Trying to trace back to the root of my problems, me being alone and locking myself up in my room every day, entering the online world as it's the only one I have seems to be the main issue. The thing is, no matter how much I try to cut myself off from it, knowing full well it's detrimental to my mental health, be it by unplugging my computer or putting other obstacles in my way, I always end up coming back to it because I really don't have anything better to do, no better hobbies to spend my free time on. I'd either sleep the day off or just sit in my room wallowing in self-pity even further, or masturbating, both of which are just copes for the lack of anything else going on in my life I both hate. It's even worse when computers were the only thing that I was ever passionate about, the only thing that I'm skilled in, and the only thing that I'm knowledgeable about, while at the same time being the main source of my anguish, and in many ways a detriment to my social skills if that's all I can really talk about. I guess music is my second big hobby, but I listen to the type of music I'd have no one else to share it with really. And I don't have a privilege of living in a populous US city full of people my age that I could relate to, that I could just "touch grass and socialize" as I saw many people suggested to others here. I live in Poland, in one of the poorest, most desolate and most miserable parts of it as well, and all the people my age already move out to larger cities for a better future because they know it as well but have the will power to act on it. Meanwhile I'm stuck in a village that's demographically nothing but elderly people with half of the houses being abandoned, and I don't think any advice from Americans like that would be applicable. Now the next logical step would be getting out of this shithole. But then that's another myriad of problems I see. First I need money to get started, to rent a flat to stay in, and to find a job in the city to keep a steady income to rent that flat, but the thing is I can barely find a steady income right here, let alone try and jump into the deep water of living in a city and finding a job there. Because I'm a coward, I lack the courage to take a risk, to take matters into my own hands and to make something out of myself. I never had to do so and now I lack the ability to do so when this would be the only way to change my life for the better.
So it all winds back to the problem being with me. First and foremost, I need to figure out how to fix myself, which is something I don't have the slightest idea about how to fix. Then I have to figure out how to get enough income to save up in this area, to then figure out how to get started in a better place with more opportunities to socialize and move forward in life, and only then may I think about figuring out how to be in a relationship with a woman and finding a significant other, something I seem to worry about too much given the myriad of other problems that overshadow that pipe dream. And there's always that fear, that is most likely fueled by online doomposting with no relation to the real world, that by the point I'll manage to figure out my own shit I'll be well over 30 and that's just as good as being dead if I haven't done so much as had a single girlfriend by that point, or perhaps I'll find my happiness one day, even if I'm over 40. Or not, and I wasn't ever meant to be happy, I was always meant to feel like shit and I should indeed kill myself like my intrusive thoughts are telling me to. There's probably more I wanted to say, and what I said could've been articulated better, but my mind jumps to too many thoughts and topics all the time and I never write them down to compile them into something more coherent. This here is definitely way better than what I would otherwise write in a worse state of mind, but it definitely fluctuated back to it in some places.
I don't know. I lack any drive, hope, motivation or goal in life and I hate it. And I realize that by posting all of this, especially on this site, I'm doing myself even more of a disservice, but I wanted to dump out some of the shit I was thinking through somewhere, even if it's the one place you shouldn't post shit like that. Though feel free to laugh at me, or give me "words of encouragement", or give me an armchair psychologist opinion why I'm an irrecoverable failure. It's not like I have much of a reputation left on this site at this point, might as well embrace being the court jester.
If for some reason you've read through all of this mindless drivel and you're compelled to post some advice, or words of encouragement, I'm telling you right now, don't. Look at this thread, or various other advice threads. Look at all the people that were in the position I'm in. Look at how much they've adhered to it. Notice the pattern, save yourself the time and do something more worthwhile with your life, my pain is the most petty and self-inflicted out of the recent ones shared in this thread anyways. Makes me feel like an asshole posting this now that I think about it, people suffer from cancer, death in family, and here I am crying about how shitty my life is all because of myself.
There. I spilled my guts, I'm never gonna scrub this off the web, it's set in stone, and frankly, I really don't care. I've accumulated enough regrets, what's one more to add to the pile.