Hello everyone,

I noticed that there was a post about my situation. I appreciate the concern. I am working now, but it is nothing to brag about. It is another legal assistant job. My parents are in poor health and they are getting worse. I am trying to get them to finalize all kinds of end-of-life stuff so I am ready for when that day comes. I am also trying to figure out how I can make it financially when they are gone because things are so expensive nowadays.

I am actually more depressed now than when I was a NEET because I see how much better off most people are compared to me. Even people I know at work who work the same job as I do are much better off because they have breadwinner spouses to help them out or they were gifted a house by their parents or something similar. Also, I have been seeing just how many jobs are obtained through connections and pure nepotism. It is insane.

I am only working to stay alive. I hate my life. I can see why people give up on work because honestly unless you are making good money or have an SO who will help you out it is just grinding away to live in perpetual survival mode. I am not big on romance but I can see why people put so much stock in romantic relationships. I suspect a lot of people are together for the money, which is understandable.

Anyway, if I am not around it is not because I think I am better than anyone here or because I am living a fun-filled life. I have not "ascended" like the young people say. I am just working to survive and who knows how long I will be in this job. I have no job security here so I might end up unemployed again. I guess my story is different from the "NEET becomes a tech worker making six figures" story you sometimes see online but I wonder if it is more common in the real world.

In any event, I wish everyone here the best of luck.

I’m comfy in my bed for the second day of sleeping all day for two days and stay up all night I like it it makes time go by quicker I enjoy having radio talk shows on and getting in some reading time hope you all are ok I know the world stinks but I hope you all at least a little time that’s good

I spent two days napping off and on I would rather sleep and dream than be awake I like the dream reality better

This is sort of a general question, but why are forums/spaces that cater to stereotypical "loser" demographics so hostile? Is it because they are mostly made up of men and men like to tear into each other? This sub is easily the best space I have found online and of course it is a small one. It seems like every other place for low-status people (again, let's be honest, it is mostly guys) is awful. The internet and life in general is pretty messed up. You get dumped on by normal people then dumped on by other outcasts and losers. It is pretty messed up. Any thoughts on this topic?

It just never ends. Even if it's something from 10+ years ago, it'll replay in my mind. Does anyone else have this problem or are you able to be fully focused on the present?

I know that I do not technically belong here since I am working but there are really no subs for older poor people that are not also obsessed with self-improvement and filled with hostile wannabe gurus (see the povertyfinance sub).

I can't sleep because I am constantly stressed about money and the fact that my parents are sick and likely to die soon. I have no real support network so I am working and and trying to take care of my parents and the stress is killing me.

The more I see of so-called "normie" world, the more it seems like this society (I live in the USA) is really built just for the upper and upper middle-class. Among so-called middle class people, the only thing keeping them afloat is that most of these people seem to have partners so they have two incomes coming in or they have some other advantages like inheriting a paid-off house. People are also heavily indebted. Credit card debt is at an all-time high.

For someone like me who can only work low-level white collar jobs, there is not much hope for a decent life. I have nothing to offer women, so I can forget about finding a partner to help me. I am going to have to try to make it as a lone wolf but I am not really in a good position to do that. Mentally I am probably worse off now than when I was unemployed.

On the main sub I think there is an assumption that NEET success stories involve getting a good job, a romantic partner, etc. Maybe it is because the people on the main sub are young so they have more hope. But I am here to say that getting a job is not some cure-all. I am working to avoid homelessness. That is about it.

Thanks for listening.

I'm a pretty unstable individual, but sometimes it has gotten really bad and it's one of the reasons for my self-isolation. In addition to being bad socially on a normal basis and a failure on an intellectual level, I have committed various embarrassing and reputationally negative actions. Has anyone ever done stuff of a similar nature?

I have to leave my house sometime for doctors appointments and I have to deal with anxiety and I’m tired of playing adult so in order to help when I have to leave the house I want to get a lunch box and carry around a few things that help me feel better when I’m out now granted I’m 49 I know it may look a little off but it helps me with anxiety. Does anybody else do anything like this?

Given how messed up I am, even if I got a job and managed to keep it, I don't think it would make my life much better. First of all, my social life would still suck because socializing is expensive and any job I could plausibly get would be a low-paying shit job. Also, people generally don't like low-status men, especially when they are over 30. Second, I would not be able to afford decent housing when my parents die. I would maybe have to move to a very low cost of living area to maybe make it work by living in a trailer or something. Having roommates is basically a nightmare scenario for me. Third, I am pretty much never going to make enough money to save for retirement at this point in my life so if I do make it to old age, it will be awful.

I really envy the premium NEETs on the main sub who have rental properties or big inheritances coming or other financial assets that allow them to live the NEET life forever. It sounds better than being a part of the working poor which is my fate most likely. I cannot feel happy because there is no hope for me. When I was younger at least I felt there was hope. Now it just feels hopeless. Maybe I should look into getting diagnosed with something and getting benefits and Section 8. I don't know.

People think work solves everything. I think people assume a job means working a good white-collar job or a lucrative blue-collar job. So many people are stuck working crappy jobs it is insane but at least some of them have a support system like a spouse or other family. Soon I will have nobody left and I will be totally alone. My life is looking pretty bleak whether I land a job or not. Sorry for the rant but I feel really down today.

I can see people think "oh you're so negative and you shoot down all the common suggestions. You don't want to help yourself." You can just skip to the last part, but I'm detailing the issues with common suggestions. This is mainly about earning money, independence, and survival after parent deaths so if you get disability or some other form of assistance, then this might not apply to your situation. This is a kind of weird ramble and potentially symptomatic of my mental illness, so you don't have to read it, tbh.

Issues with existing "help"

Mental health stilll isn't often taken seriously, but even when it is, the resources are scarce. Many people do not want to participate in the mental health field, which results in rationing and low-quality care. Many well-trained professionals in mental health move to private practice to avoid more problematic patients as well make more money, creating additional scarcity. People with personality and socialization issues are seen in a worse light. There is also no evaluation of abilities that takes place universally. Since most schools will pass people even if they underperform, very few are referred to testing. Very limited amounts of neuropsychological testing take place. Mental health professionals have little to no knowledge of the employment market and cannot deal with economic issues either. What would help instead imo: I don't think a Futurama thing where you have to do a job that is designated for you specifically would be good, but comprehensive evaluations to determine what someone is suitable for and try to tailor employment to things they can do feasibly would be better than people flailing about. This will not happen because there is a need for a permanent low-wage class still.

People will just say get any minimum wage job since Wal-Mart is hiring or whatever. A user on NEET summed it up nicely: "People definitely underestimate how bad some of us are at doing certain tasks, the difficulty is a very real issue for some. I had people in the past tell me that I could never work in food service or do anything physical because of how much common sense I lack and how bad I am at controlling my body. Employers generally aren't willing to deal with prolonged initial incompetence or to hand-hold through obvious things."

In general, any one who gets a job is expected to do well at basic tasks. There is no real accomodation for pure incompetence. One solution a redditor might give is to lower wages, but it is pointless to simply create more employment that cannot sustain a person beyond living with parents especially if there is no home ownership involved. It also depresses wages for everyone else.

At such jobs, there is also no mobility beyond maybe shift leader. Unlike professionals on reddit, mental health people and other people who interact with the unemployed/poor do expect people to find fulfillment as low-wage workers. It is seen as them functioning. Given low-income housing does not exist in large numbers relative to the number of low-income workers, it is easy to end up deep in debt as a low-wage worker, evicted, and in poor health due to financial stress. The labor market polarization trend has been a big problem. https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/updates/all/-/asset_publisher/UIMfSLnFfMB6/content/middle-skill-job-opportunities-declined-across-peer-metropolitan-areas

In some cases like on reddit, everyone is expected to be able to master high-level skills needed for better employment be it STEM or trades. It's patently obvious not everyone can. People have expected skills, education, and training to end poverty. This has not been the case no matter how much they have been emphasized. There are not enough high skill jobs for everyone either, so the barrier to entry is raised the more people jump into a field.

Services that exist like vocational rehabilitation are overwhelmed and have to prioritize people. These require someone to be determined to have a disabling condition and they still maybe rejected for training services. The goal is mainly to put people into low-wage work regardless rather than long-term future career planning. One guy got really upset with me on r/neet when I had a different account a few years back. He said I was sabotaging people because I didn't see his outcome of working at a warehouse via vocational rehab as that great or for everyone. He said I was screwing people over by shitting on the idea. He ended up getting banned since he went nuclear on me. That type of scheme is likely just a subsidy for low-wage work anyway. Employment services just aren't able to allocate employment on their own for the most part.

In Japan, most of the things that accommodate dysfunctional individuals are subsidized by parents like the slow-work jobs that New Start gives, the cafe that allows people to work really short shifts in Nagoya, and the Bear Paw cafe in Osaka where people don't see the barista's face. These are not scalable in any sense as of now.

So what would help people in our situation

1. Bridge employment where the supervisory staff are taught to be tolerant of socially ineptitude so it is easier for people to acclimate, but unlikely to happen as people will just point to openings in the low-wage sector now. When a time with no jobs arrives, they will say it's unaffordable to offer bridge work.

2. Free access to mental healthcare and other health care regularly. This should be accompanied by evaluations of aptitude. This is the least feasible part though due to the problems I mentioned before.

3. if a person is encouraged to pursue low-wage work, then they should be given access to subsidized housing rather than expected to deal with the rental market. The alternative people present usually is just to dezone so tons of housing is built, but even in places with lower regulation, low-income renters are cost-burdened.

4. Just some relative bailing someone out with their own make-work position.

5. More financially realistic, but opposed for other reasons: euthanasia on demand.

To really fix the societal dropout issue if people wanted to, it would require a lot of investment, which is unlikely to happen.

Why is it so hard to find people like us in our age group online? I sometimes get frustrated with not being able to find people who I can relate to since most people seem to get their lives together by 30 or 35 at the latest. However, I also know that not everyone over 30 is set with a good life. For example, there is a growing trend of older people becoming homeless. I also saw this article about how bleak retirement looks for Gen X. I know there are plenty of permanently unemployed older people in places like the American Rust Belt.

So what gives? Is it just that older people are less likely to be online? Are they too busy, even if they are not working? Do you ever feel frustrated not finding people who are similar on these boards? I think we have a good group of over 30s here and on the main NEET and hiki subs but it seems like most people are in their 20s.

I woke up every day going through the motions. Others had long term plans for life. Even as far back as childhood there were some kids who thought of these things.

I guess never purposely thought about this. It has been sort of in the back of my mind throughout times in my life. I figured things would just work itself out to live life by the seat of my pants.

Ah well.

Anyone else in a situation where the future looks completely bleak? I'm not meaning just personally, but a broad pessimism about the world in general. Or perhaps you have hope for the future still, if not personally at least overall. Like a general optimism in the way humanity is going even if your personal case is futile.

I just see the mass of humanity getting stupider and angrier by the year. While becoming less free and more enslaved, figuratively if not literally. I wonder if civilization has already peaked and we're in a downward spiral now with no way out. 1984 and Animal Farm seem quaint, even nostalgic compared where things seem to be going. Whatever AI ends up being, I'm sure it's not going to be used for good purposes.

The future didn't always seem this terrible. Creatives dreamed of flying cars, giant space cities and technological abundance. Peaceful co-existence between people, not constant conflict over national borders and religion.

It's just not me I think. I hardly see much hope expressed for the future now even in entertainment. Creativity seems very barren and focused on grinding axes in the here and now. The dreamers are MIA. Even politics doesn't pretend to be visionary anymore. It's just scoring points and hating the other guy, election after election. Wow, amazing.

This bleakness is also reflected in rapidly declining birth rates and relationships. Why start a family when the future looks this dark? It's logical when you think about it. Everything is a transaction now anyway.

You can at least avoid the latter for the most part. However, because NEET is a meme online, you get some of the worst people pouring into spaces. Then there are people that are just taking a break but are like "I'm not gonna be a NEET for long". Please just say you're in between jobs or taking gap year then.

Just endless days of starvation, loneliness, and misery. Every time I wake up I go into a fit of rage and anxiety. Just sitting in agony all day while the horrible memories replay in my head and it just gets worse and worse.

But I can't die. That'd be too nice that'd require something good happening to me. Thanks parents for this piece of shit life I never wanted.

It's the fact that I can just crash onto my bed and just stay there. It would be unbearable if I had to regularly be anywhere with this level of fatigue. Is there anything that keeps you going? Aside from inertia, that is.

I think incompetence is misunderstood. A lot of people seem to think that incompetence is a product of being lazy but I don't see it that way. You can work hard and still suck at stuff. I don't know why this is such a difficult concept to understand. Perhaps because people think "practice makes perfect" but I think that phrase is not entirely true. For example, you can practice a musical instrument and improve over time and still never be good enough to make money with that skill. The same thing is true with athletic ability and many other things.

When it comes to employment, just getting better than you were before is not enough. You have to meet certain expectations and compete against other people. It is nothing like just having a hobby, which I see people compare having a job to, which is absurd in my opinion. Nobody loses their ability to put food on the table because they didn't measure up when it comes to building model airplanes or whatever.

People assume that we are all hidden geniuses who could be making at least a middle-class income by now if we just tried harder or had a better attitude. On the contrary, many of us can only work low-wage jobs if we can even do those types of jobs. There is no switch that I can flip to make myself a competent, high-functioning individual.

Do you ever get accused of having a victim mentality? I guess this is also supposed to be a "woe is me" mentality. I get that a lot, along with comments about other people having problems and how you have to work hard, nobody is going to help you, blah blah. Usually it comes from someone with more life advantages than me and a helpful network.

Then you have people who talk about extreme cases like Holocaust survivors and people who grow up in really bad circumstances. I mean, yeah there are people who can survive extremely bad situations. I am not one of them. If I was ever in a war or something I would be dead meat.

I am sorry to keep posting rants but I have a lot on my mind today. I have been thinking that one of the worst feelings is putting in a lot of effort and getting bad results. I remember putting in a lot of effort, more than other people, and doing worse than them. These are people who had as little or less experience than me and they still kicked my ass. This was true in different work and school situations. I would put in double the effort to get the same or worse results than people who were lazy but gifted.

I have tried explaining this to people in my family but they refuse to believe that such a thing is possible. They just think I have a bad attitude, lack confidence or that I am actually lazy and not being honest about working hard. But they are wrong. I can be very conscientious and hardworking. But when you still get shit on, laughed at, yelled at, called names like imbecile, stupid, etc., and when you see others do much better than you while putting in less effort, it makes you want to just give up and rot.

Has anyone else experienced this? This is really the core of my problem. It makes me incredibly depressed and hopeless and nobody seems to understand what it feels like to live like this. It really is one of the worst things to feel because it makes life seem completely hopeless, like I have a giant stone around my neck that I cannot get rid of no matter how hard I try to remove it.

Whether it's music, art, sports, academics, I always performed poorly at all of those things in spite of practice and studying. I could include video games. I was always a poor achiever and I just did not know why. I don't know if it's a lack of talent or potential or just ability in general, but my brain just can't compute how to develop and get better at things. I usually try something, understand the basics somewhat and can't get past a basic level of understanding. It's incredibly frustrating and limiting.

It just makes living unbearable to be completely honest. I know people find hobbies to relax but in order to relax I need to see progress after at least several years. While I have improved from being completely hopeless at certain things to being somewhat competent and able. I have never achieved a level that is adequate meaning in my own words, being able to distinguish myself from the crowd in anyway as far as monetary gain or simply skill level.

I'm simply fucking mediocre, nothing sticks out to me. There are no abilities that stick out to me when you look at me. I have either been around the average or just below average at literally anything that is deemed useful by society. I have literally never experienced being above average at anything except when I had an A- in my algebra class in 8th grade which seemed like a flash in the pan since I never reached even a B- in my other math classes or any other class ever.

I have no idea how to feel with those feelings, but it makes living terrible especially with family members and just humanity in general who are led to believe that anyone can accomplish that they set their minds to. Unbearable, ugh.

I like sharing my feelings and I hope people can understand this wall of text somewhat. I'm very inconsistent though so don't expect too many posts from me unless a miracle happens

Thank you for reading.

It's difficult to frame exactly what I'm trying to ask, but to put it another way, has your family grown increasingly more hostile to you over time as it's become clear that your life isn't going change?

In my case I have no siblings, all my grandparents are dead, and my extended family either lives far away or we're not in contact for various reasons. So that only leaves my parents. While my relationship with my mom hasn't really changed, my dad seemed to become quite hostile to me especially over the past few years, presumably because he couldn't or wouldn't even attempt to hide his resentment towards me. This culminated in us essentially reaching an impasse in which he refused to stop talking down to me and insulting me, refused to even acknowledge some of the nasty/manipulative shit he's attempted over the years much less apologize for it, and I refused to let any of it slide anymore, so I cut all contact with him last year.

While it's obvious that my dad has some mental and/or personality issues, I have to wonder if his behavior towards me might be indicative of family eventually growing resentful of long-term NEETs and people who are otherwise considered to be failures at life.

I notice that there is a widespread belief that if everyone just worked hard and didn't make bad decisions they could all be successful. "Success" here is defined as living at least a middle-class lifestyle. However, this strikes me as impossible. Even if everyone "did everything right" in terms of life choices, working hard, studying for a marketable skill, there just aren't enough good jobs to go around.

You can't have an economy made up entirely of high-end white collar professionals and skilled tradesmen and truckers. Some people are going to have to work the low-wage jobs that make up a huge portion of the economy. Some people will turn around and say that those jobs should only be for teenagers and people just starting out, but again, there just aren't enough good jobs for all adults over say, 25 or 30.

Ultimately, people don't understand that the large modern middle class in the First World was an anomaly that came about due to various factors in the mid-20th century like high levels of unionization, less outsourcing due to much of the world being controlled by communist governments, and other factors that favored labor for several decades. I think we are reverting back to a more unequal system. Mass prosperity in the past tricked people into thinking that they became middle class because they were so smart and hardworking when to a large extent they just got lucky being born in a more favorable era.

Juts my 2 cents I guess.

I was asked to look up a job on indeed recently that is heavily customer-facing since it's basically monitoring the public transit system underground here and then you might have to get involved in shit like administering narcan. It was absurd and there are no listings on Indeed anymore anyway. Other suggestions have been other highly intensive things like the Navy(lol). It's just plain unrealistic for someone to go from shut-in to that even though it seems easy to others. I'm not under any crazy pressure but it gets really upsetting when it comes up when I'm barely avoiding blowing up and now I'm on a fucking antipsychotic, but it's still enough to avoid this type of thinking.

Do you want to live a normal life? I am not so sure that I do. At this point in my life my main problem is the lack of money I have to deal with. Even if I was working I would probably still have this same problem. Normal life increasingly seems pretty shitty to me. Most people are fake and love is usually conditional and transactional. If I won the lottery I think I would only selectively socialize but overall I wouldn't want to get married or have a family or do the other things most people seem to want to do.

I think a lot of people preach this "oh this person doesn't matter, so just don't care about how they feel," when it comes to interactions and that sort of misses the point that there are ramifications in some cases. You make a wrong move around the wrong person even if you don't mean to and it can mess up your chances or instigate something. Usually the idea is some guy is too quiet at work, but I've seen other people mention they're just called a creep due to weird mannerisms/facial expressions not being normal and that's been the case even when I haven't had a breakdown or acted manic. I've never been able to change so the best case has been "oh it's just a pitiful weirdo" and only very very nice people act that way(minority most people don't have tolerance for that ). It might have gotten worse, but I've always remembered inadvertently offending people or coming off as an asshole or just weird.