Men in your 20s, do you ever feel like you’re wasting your youth? How do you deal with this feeling?

Yes, all day every day.

Depression, mostly. Distracting myself.

In my 20s I have tried going back to school but being unable to working to pay my bills while also going to class, so I dropped out again.

Even when I stopped school and worked full time, I could barely scrape most of the time. I’ve always been very depressed, but a certain event about 4 years ago made it much worse. I quit my job and moved back in with family with the intention of trying to move farther away and leave this place behind. I put in applications, but anyone that called back gave up on me when they learned I wasn’t local, even though I was plenty willing to travel for in person interviews and would have moved right away given the opportunity. Didn’t find anything in the places I was trying to move to, and I ended up jobless, burned through the small savings I had, and used credit for a while.

I did end up getting a similar job to my old one, except it ended up being an absolutely awful place to work and I couldn’t handle the stress. I found something else still similar that was much easier to deal with. This last year it had been getting worse and worse. Working retail and coming home everyday thinking “is this the day I get COVID, bring it home and kill my grandparents” is a shit way to live. At least over the last couple years I was able to eliminate my debt and now have a decent amount of savings. I ended up losing my job a couple months, but I’m fine with it because I had started to absolutely loathe that company over the past couple years that I’ve worked there.

I’m 26 now. I hate my life. I don’t even feel like looking for a job, everything I’ve ever done has made me even more miserable than default or not paid me enough to live on my own, or both. There’s nothing in my life that I really enjoy much, aside from maybe distracting myself with games and anime and reddit a bit. But it’s more so just something to pass the time. I have no hope that I will ever enjoy being alive. That my life will ever be one worth living.

There’s a good chance I won’t make it to 30. I honestly hope I don’t a lot of the time.

/r/AskMen Thread