Hey robots. I live with severe and untreatable clinical depression and social anxiety. I'm fat, I'm ugly, I have a giant neckbeard, and I even wear a fedora. But I'm also 48 years old and have had an exciting, interesting, and adventurous life despite my limitations. I've hosted two radio shows, run for public office, been professionally published as a writer, been on the cover of every newspaper in the country, founded an NGO, and have a Wikipedia article written about me.
I'd like to help my fellow robots escape their parents' basements and have a full and satisfying life. Ask me anything and I'll help you if I can.
>>27476449
>been on the cover of every newspaper in the country
What did you do, OP?
Were guns involved?
>>27476581
I'm a radical union organizer. I organize on the street, and the media considers unionizing hobos, buskers, and scrappers to be a newsworthy man-bites-dog story.
>>27476449
How are you depressed if you had a fullflling live? Now on your way to old age you should be free to relax without the pression to suceed, so how? It's that the dopamine of a fabulous life is that addictive?
My current mission right now is to breed a 6IV eeve and complete my anime backlog, and you know what? The pression to suceed is here, but I have o get that fucking eevee and that's why I'm a non depresed neet. Yet.
>>27476449
The depression never goes away, does it... I'm 40 and I've been depressed my entire adult life. I still managed to get out into the world and do interesting things, but... that sense of hopelessness is always there.
>>27476707
Are you familiar with the hypothesis of depressive realism? Clinical studies have repeatedly proved that people who are depressed show markedly superior judgment to those who are not depressed. For example, depressed people are better at guessing whether a given shape will fit a given hole; non-depressed people err constantly on the side of optimism. What this suggests is that depression is actually the *removal* of a filter which makes the world seem irrationally pleasant for everyone else. The idea is that feelings of being trapped trigger your brain to begin feeding you the most accurate possible information to enable you to escape.
Depression is a dark blessing. If you can train yourself to create a meta-narrative -- that is, to be able to take a mental step backwards and observe your own thought processes -- you can take advantage of the very accurate, very lucid thinking depression can give you. Then in the interstitial periods between waves of depression, you can put that accurate analysis to work for you.
>>27476732
Not for me, anyway. But you should be aware that modern research is showing long-term depression causes permanent brain damage which makes depression more and more likely. The hippocampus, for example, atrophies in people with severe, long-term depression, making learning and memory tasks much harder. It's why clinical depression is now treated like a medical emergency when it first shows up.
>>27476846
I hope you are feeling real smug right now for your contrived way of calling me dumb, cause you'll never know the happiness of making the perfect pokeymen.
Get well old nigga.
>>27477052
>calling me dumb
What the hell are you talking about?
>>27476664
Ah, it's you again. It's been awhile, good to see you.
>>27477376
Well, I don't come around much these days, but I try to give the younger robots the benefit of my experience when I do. As you can see, they don't have much interest in actually learning anything; they really just want to indulge in self-pity and do absolutely nothing for themselves. Which is sad on many levels.
>>27476846
fuck all that shit you said makes sense .
So it's not me the world really is a shitty ass sandwich ?
Tell us more old dude , hot any links ?
Also where does your money come from r u neet ?
>>27476449
>>27476846
don't know if you're making all this up but you seem like a damn smart dude and im looking forward to the rest of this thread. subscribed
>>27477478
Robots never have wanted to improve themselves, you should know this. Anyway, I've got studying to do, ive got a lab practical in 15 hrs that i am woefully unprepared for. hope the thread goes well and that you've been doing well.
>>27477654
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
I do a lot of things for money. Mostly I do some tarot readings and get some disability, but a lot of that money goes to renovating our union hall. My food budget is about $35 US per month. Fortunately I've learned to live simply and find my satisfaction in my work.
>>27477730
I've outed myself here occasionally. Everything I've said about myself is true. That's not to say that my life has been all roses; I've been homeless many times over the years, once for an entire year. My health is poor and I'm going slowly blind from a rare form of glaucoma. But I've found ways to live with the same challenges as all the other robots here, and not to let them limit me. I like to try and teach others how to do likewise.
>>27476449
What is your rational on suicide?
I feel like with my long term (current?) previous battle with clinical mental illness I will be stuck in this inescapable gravity pulling me towards the void.
Society doesn't have my, or people in similar positions, best interests in heart, the universe is just completely ambivalent about it, and I have myself working against me.
A pretty good heuristic for analyzing whether experiences are net positive or negative is to think whether one would prefer to be asleep for the duration of it. As long as you tend to prefer getting married and going to work and dealing with problems over simply being unconscious through the lot of it if given the option, suicide isn't rational.
I feel like there honestly isn't a moment in my life where I wish I was awake. Might be slightly emotionally bias right now but I haven't thought otherwise as far back as I can remember, with some serious memory problems that is.
The only honest reason I haven't is that it's a bit of a hassle. I mostly live a lukewarm existence currently from past and current dissociation. It's on the verge of unbearable but not quite there right now. I would prefer to be asleep without a doubt though.
>>27478056
Have you ever read anything about existentialism? We all know the answers to the eternal existential questions: What happens when I die? Why am I here? Who am I really? What's the purpose of living? We know that there is no purpose, no meaning beyond what we create, that after death there is nothing, and that what we are is what we have made of ourselves. But these answers are so terrifying that most people spend their lives hiding behind religion and politics and distraction to deny them.
If you can find the courage to admit to yourself that the Universe has no grand plan for you, then you become free to write yourself across it. Why do anything? Because you can. Because it is your Will to do so. You act specifically BECAUSE there is nothing compelling you to do so. It takes courage to step into the nihilist void, but still greater courage to defy the void and manifest your Will to Power. Every act becomes great when it is done not because of the potential for reward but because you have moved your Will to accomplish it.
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." -- Friedrich Nieztsche
>>27477923
>$35/month
What the fuck????? Teach me o wise one
>>27477923
Um sorry not sorry but , that $35 figure has to be BS unless you post an itemized list of products and prices .
So I though you were legit now ...
$35 a week is feasible but that figure is NOT possible
>>27477654
>>27478410
me again , on second thought >>27478404
there's nothing to teach if anything about your story was true you'd be on the full food stamp benefit of $194 unless your income was over the cutoff in EITHER case you wouldn't have to exist on such a meger (and impossible) food budget
Don't try to BS neets about this stuff we fucking know
I'm going to go back to drinking myself into a stupor
>>27478286
That's all I actually read about these days. Along with Absurdism. They are nice, well thought out philosophical theories but not exactly practical to implement for someone with complete anhedonia.
>>27478404
>>27478410
$35 US is about $50 CDN. Here's what I buy in a typical month:
30 cans of assorted beans (chick peas and kidney beans mostly) @ $1 each
5 pounds of onions @ $1/pound
1 pound of margarine @ $1
12 packs of ramen noodles (@ 4/$1)
3 dozen eggs @ $2.29/dozen
And that's about it. I sometimes do substitutions, like I'll buy some dried beans instead of canned beans. Or I'll get some pita bread instead of eggs and make hummus from the chick peas.
Like I said, I live simply and eat just one or two meals a day.
>>27478500
Pro tip: Not everyone here lives in the USA.
>>27478519
I've been anhedonic for most of my life. I do organizer training, and one of the things I teach young people is how to keep going and getting work done when everything seems useless and futile and all you're experiencing seems to be failure. The thing is, you have to teach yourself to treat failure as a scourge to drive you on. When something goes wrong, it should make you want to push even harder. Everything is a numbers game; the more times you roll the dice, the greater the chance that you'll win a victory. And a single victory will keep you warm through many a long, cold, lonely night.
>>27478560
> poor health
> lives almost entirely on beans
>>27478743
I'm diabetic and have been for 20+ years. Beans are about the healthiest thing I can afford to eat. They've got a lot of natural fibre and have a reasonably low glycemic index. They're also filling. And they're extremely versatile; I can make them into a soup, a stew, vegetarian chili, bean dip, or eat them plain as a snack.
I'm vegetarian, diabetic, and have no access to a fridge or stove, just a microwave, so I have limited choices in what I can eat, especially on my budget. I make sure to pick up spices whenever I can so that I can make my food as palatable as possible. Even adding a little garlic powder and habanero sauce can change the flavour of what I'm eating a lot.
I find it amusing that people think I'm lying about my food budget, since I've lived on a lot less than $50 a month over the years. For a period of two years I survived on $40 a month for food, clothing, laundry, AND food. And there was a period of about three months where I lived on $5 a month -- nothing but rice, potatoes, pasta, and margarine.
>>27478893
I went through a period of deep frying bread crusts to give myself acid reflux so I wouldn't feel my hunger pains anymore. IKTFB, when your only food for the day is half a bread crust and your own oesophegus.
>>27476449
Are you Michael Moore?
My friend, are you a virgin?
>>27478983
When I had access to a stove, I used to make my own bread all the time. It's wonderfully cheap, especially if you make sourdough with your own homemade starter. But you don't even need that; a little bit of margarine or oil and some flour, salt, and water and you can fry up some perfectly tasty pan-bread.
>>27479050
No. If you really want to know who I am, that's me in the pic.
>>27479083
Surprisingly, no. I'm asexual, but I'm old enough that Queer Theory was in its infancy when I was young and I didn't know what asexuality was. I just thought I was a freak. I had a succession of girlfriends to try to hide my lack of a sex drive. And I *can* have sex; the machinery works. I just don't enjoy it. Plus I made sure I had girlfriends with kinks which could be satisfied without penetrative sex.
>>27479217
That's just a beard, not a neckbeard.
Neckbeards are shitty, patchy and thin. Yours looks pretty good.
>>27476449
Glad for your success OP, you sound like a pretty chill guy.
OP as a 32yo NEET with no career or skills what do I do?
>>27479354
I'm blessed with Scottish blood. I used to think I looked weird, but then I saw a video of a Scottish strongman competition and, to my amazement, they ALL looked like me.
>>27476449
Whats your first and last name faggot
>>27479466
generations of inbreeding will do that
>>27479436
Have you thought about busking? Busking doesn't just mean playing a musical instrument. There's all kinds of stuff you can do to make money on the street if you're creative. There's clowns, jugglers, mimes, caricaturists, and even people who make a living painting themselves grey and standing perfectly still for hours. I do tarot readings, myself, on a little folding table. You'll never get rich, but all the money you make is untaxed and untracable. And it will get you out of the house, meeting people. Give me an idea of your talents and maybe I can give you some idea. I knew a guy, for example, who used to walk around with a typewriter and a rhyming dictionary and compose poems on the spot for people on a theme of their choice for $10 a pop. Made a lot of money, too. Tourists loved him.
>>27479514
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Nellis
Sounds like you're pretty cool to me.
Do you think you could beat this? I used to have 2 more.
>>27479568
Wrong generation, my friend. I never got into those card games. For us it was marbles and pogs. And first-edition AD&D of course.
>>27479217
Give yourself some credit m8. You aren't ugly at all.
>>27479567
Not him, but I have no self confidence and am definitely not comfortable in public places regardless. Any chance for me?
>>27476449
if you are negatively mentioning the fact that you wear a fedora, and say it could be negative to your appearance, maybe you should stop wearing it.
Besides, it looks good on you anyway, so don't worry about the fedora.
>>27479665
No, I am genuinely unattractive. The reason you don't see it is because I'm confident with my ugliness and because I have developed my own sense of style which removes context against which to judge me. If I shaved so you could see my big fat moon face, and wore a stained Slipknot t-shirt two sizes too small -- like a lot of robots do -- I'd be a clear 2/10. But because I play into a certain stereotype of the beardy biker type without actually trying to copy that style entirely, people have no way to judge me except against myself. This is something I always try to explain to robots whenever they have an "I'm so ugly" pity-party thread, and no one ever listens.
>>27479687
I have social anxiety, just like you. Possibly even worse. I've fainted in supermarkets just from being there on a busy weekend around too many people. And no matter how many times I went on the air to host my radio show, every time the mic went live my hands would shake and I'd drip cold sweat. The thing is, I never let it hold me back. I just learned to live with the anxiety. It's not that the anxiety went away, it's that I learned to stop caring that I was anxious. And you can too.
>>27479743
Oh, I love my fedoras. I have three of them, all of them genuine 1950s vintage. I also own a black oilskin trenchcoat, smoke a pipe. I mention them only because it's such a trope around here. I want people to understand that if I can accomplish all the things I have while living with all the same weaknesses and disadvantages of the rest of the robots -- and wear a much-maligned hat to boot -- then everyone else can make it too, as long as they're willing to put aside dreams of being "normal" and strike out on their own into unknown territory.
>>27478560
That's simply not true. 1 canadian dollar is worth 75 US cents. The actual conversion would be 35 USD equals 26.25 CDN.
>>27480166
> First Can$ > USA$
> Then Can$ < USA$
>>27480166
As of this second, 50.00 CAD = 37.8950 USD. Which is only $2 off from my estimate. If you're going to call me a liar, at least get your math right.
>>27480262
>>27480269
I understand, my bad. My nodding ass just can't keep up
>>27480166
other way around m8. it used to be like that a while ago before it all went to shit
![windsor-ontario-august-18-2015-richard-is-a-member-of-i[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/0GHrhgb.jpg "windsor-ontario-august-18-2015-richard-is-a-member-of-i[1].jpg")
Should I even try to socialize with people? Am I really going to get anything out of it?
Also, is this guy Indian?
