Reality

Centurian9

I am early 20s and I have received my bachelors degree and got a job and now after about a year of work, I feel extremely depressed. I have lost all motivation and after going home from work all I want to do is sleep and have no motivation to do anything else.

I am a very introverted person and work in an open office where everyone sits beside each other and can see each others screens. I feel insecure, I feel like I am being watched and try to avoid this environment by taking constant breaks, arranging or joining unnecessary meetings just to get out of that environment. When I have no work, I pretend that I'm doing something important since everyone around me always has massive amounts of work and never leave on time. The commute is killing me every day, I have a very stressful journey and already crashed my bicycle due to stress and daydreaming thinking about my work. I feel like a corporate slave and I can see that everyone in this job is soulless as I am, work long hours for no additional pay, take a single short break because they are so "busy". I am also being supervised by a senior position supervisor who always panics if something goes wrong and puts massive pressure on me even though most of the time it is not something that I can solve myself and have to rely on the service provider.

Thinking that I would have to do this for the rest of my life just leaves me with the feeling that I'd rather be dead and I never really strongly considered suicide but now I simply don't care about my life and became reckless with my actions such as speeding, extreme anger issues (smashing the mirror in the house and throwing objects at walls)

I know that even if I change my job, I would still be working in an open office, corporate environment with stupid phrases, procedures and environment which creates anxiety since I am a very private person and can work much more effectively alone with no one beside me. I know that I would still be supervised and have a boss ordering me around or not understanding and blaming me no matter where I work.

I have lost my father a few years ago who had his own quite successful business, I wanted to join him in the business after I finish my school but he died before he could teach me anything. This again brought me into depression but at that time I wasn't as depressed as I currently am and could see the future. Now the reality has hit me in the head like "Oh ****, I didn't expect" after I joined a company.

I would give everything now to join my father and work with him. I would always work with him during summers and it was the best time of my life. He was the smartest person I knew and still do to this date, everyone would come for him to advice and he thought me countless things. I know now that if he was alive, he would guide me. I have lost a mentor and now I'm lost in life doing something I hate. Knowing that I'm being a corporate slave while he had a successful business makes me feel worthless and not worth of living. I can say with 100% certainty that I would rather be dead than work for a corporate company for the next 5 years or more.

I have tried to create a few business on the side, anything really I would rather be a man with a van and make half the money but get out of the corporate environment. I am in the process of creating a few small businesses but then I get demotivated when I see that every market seems to be over saturated and I might be forced to either continue working for a corporate company or get a low end unskilled job which would also make me feel useless. I'm sure my father would be proud of me doing an unskilled job for the rest of my life after he had a successful business. I would be grateful even if I could make minimum wage on side "hustles". I am investing more and more time on the side businesses but I still do not see the light at the end of the tunnel. But even being someone as a man with a van the competition is fierce and I would be lucky to make €100 per month. Am I doomed to be working for someone else? Do I have a 0.0001% chance of success? I don't know.

Sorry for the long message but I feel much better after writing all this.

LolaJJ

Hey OP,

Sorry about your father and your missed opportunity to work for/with him. That is incredibly sad. However, you are where you are and you have to figure out a route to get you where you want to be. It sounds like you have worked hard to get to where you are, and you are still young. You can build on that.

My advice, as an almost 40 year old is to try and pace out your life. If you keep looking at life as in "the rest of my life" that gives you an awful lot of years to fill and an overwhelming amount to stress over if you can't currently see a way out of your current situation.

If you feel like you would be happiest working for yourself then try and set yourself short term goals that you can achieve that will lead you there.

It may be that you might have to keep working where you are now but if it's facilitating your short-term goals I.E. putting some cash aside every month to put in to a start up or further educate yourself - at least you will feel like you are moving in the right direction.

I have no idea what industry you are working in, but, it really is the era of opportunity and starting a new enterprise is more achieveable than one might believe. There's an excellent book - The Lean Start-Up by Eric Ries which outlines how you can work on various business or start-up concepts to test the market without any significant investment. It's excellent.

But seriously, stop looking at the long term and just take it week by week or even day by day and try do small things that will get you closer to where you feel you would like to be

antix80

Hi Centurian

What did you expect to happen after 20 years of education, where you had cycle after cycle of petty exams that didn't particularly matter too much. Sure, you could study and get decent grades - but to what end? Were you just preparing to work in a dingy, noisy, corporate office fully of dickheads and weasels? You're finished education, potentially you have freedom if you want it. Take a moment to figure out what you would have done if you hadn't decided to dive head-first into the job you're in right now.

I'd recommend visiting a GP to see if you're depressed (spoiler alert.. you might be). Regardless of whether you are depressed or not, counselling can be great - especially if you haven't had counselling before. The death of your father seems to be affecting you, and it sounds like you're disenfranchised by a job which - really, you could walk out the door right now and not look back if you chose to.

Try to take some time off work. Don't hoard annual leave and take sick leave if you feel it would benefit you personally over this difficult time.

For homework: ask yourself a question. If you weren't in your current job, and you had to leave your house at 8am every morning, Monday to Saturday, and couldn't come home til 10pm... how would you spend your days?