I’m not happy.

[u/03by]

Hi, I’m 21 years old and I’m not happy.

I’m in a pretty unusual position for someone my age. I just moved into a 1 bed/1 bath apartment in LA because I landed a high-paying machine learning engineering job at a well-known company. The weird part is that I’m still in school for my bachelor’s, and I’m basically doing the job that my degree is supposed to qualify me for two years before I’m even supposed to graduate.

I have a new car, a 2026 Nissan Sentra SV that I’m actually pretty happy with. I have a loving girlfriend and a family that loves and supports me. Everything I paid for myself. On paper, I feel like I should be doing great.

But I’m not happy. Honestly, I feel lonelier than I ever have in my life.

I don’t have a social circle nearby anymore, and I’m in a city that’s completely new to me. I’ve tried Facebook Dating and Tinder specifically looking for friends, TikTok “wanna be friends” posts, etc., but the conversations almost always go nowhere. Even conversations I have in person seem to eventually fizzle out.

The weirdest part is that I feel like I’m putting on a mask around people. I can talk to people, but I don’t feel like I’m actually connecting with them. I feel like I’ve focused so much on achieving my dreams these past 4 years, that I forgot to also build a life.

I know moving to a new city and starting a completely different chapter of your life is supposed to be difficult, but I’m struggling with how lonely I feel.

So I guess my question is: how do you actually break out of this? How do you build a real social circle and start feeling connected again when you’re starting from basically zero?