At the point that I have a finished product sitting in my hands, there is no combination of reasoning that will prevent me from desperately wanting to share it with others. It does not matter that I did it for myself - in fact, that is always how it starts - but I personally feel that it's a waste if I end up passing on before I declare it ready to show to the world.

I believe this indicates a problem in my line of thinking: desperation to affect the world or get someone to care. My belief is that if I keep everything I do to myself, then I have not "affected the world" in any way, and this is not good. My accomplishments will die with me and nobody will ever know what kind of a person I was, and all my life boiled down to was essentially finding a way to be independent and survive and then participate in solitary hedonism for the rest of it. For whatever reason I find this a suboptimal use of my own life. I am in a position in the midst of failed startups and college applications and poverty to have enough time and capital to work on my ideas, to do nearly anything, and I can squander it in any number of ways. I lose the game every day knowing this and only remembering it if someone publishes a life advice article but ignoring it the rest of the time.

It feels as if my worth is tied to other people irrespective of what I tell myself otherwise, because of my desperation to have someone to confide in, but not in a way that is effortless. I keep believing I have to spend a lot of effort working on skills to deserve the kind of friends I want to know that have also worked very hard to hone skills. I don't really understand why, except maybe I don't know anyone that fits into my perfectly idealized view of the world. My family wasn't pushing me to overachieve either. My standards for people and things are just too high.

Do I enjoy creating things? Not necessarily, but not creating enough things that pass my arbitrary filter before I die is supposedly worse. But this is only a vague ideal and not a concrete goal. It just looms over me constantly, as if I should have a constant reason to criticize the way I am living as "not what I really want." But I still believe the vague goal if I end up writing it out concretely. I don't want it to go away, or I will miss wanting, even mildly, to become "that kind of person."

I understand this is discouraging me and I have to work on it somehow. Maybe getting the recognition from someone that I can accomplish things I set my mind to and that there is a path to what I want to do would clear out most of the issue. (But I don't mean people telling me them over Internet messages or therapy sessions just because I asked. It doesn't seem to work. I can tell all of these things to myself, but for some reason I can't personally believe them until someone wiser than me can confide in me enough to recognize and confirm them through what I actually do, not what I say.)