Find professional help (NOW) to starting approaching it and dealing with it.
Find professional help (NOW) to help manage your mental disorder (depression) which carries an enormous and present risk of self-harm.
Get whatever the fuck is wrong with your foot fixed, and start walking out the door on the regular.
You appear to be bright, talented, and a capable writer. Resume applying those gifts to the people around you instead of yourself. You are the best person in your own life, now be the best person in other people's lives.
...Why?
I've spent most of the last ten years trying to do just that. Do you know what it has gotten me? Let me tell you what it has gotten me: friends and family that never call unless they need something; an utterly depleted bank account; a complete lack of respect or even human regard from my peers; a pile of strife and struggle and pain and misery and not one single positive thing to show for it other than impotently small differences in the lives of sycophants.
No, do not live for others. Never live for others, because nobody will laud you for it -- in fact, people will find it laughable and openly sneer at you for it.
He wrote, "In the aftermath of emotional implosion; friends, family, colleagues and even strangers will metamorph into an invasive species from planet Concern," and I thought, "pfft, that must be lovely."
Further, I really wish people would stop talking to people with depression as though they were in boot camp for Turning Their Lives Around. e-shouting "find professional help!" is a sure sign of someone who has never actually tried seeking professional help, because here's the thing about a lot of "professional help": the professionals really suck. How do you think someone feels after sharing their troubles with a cold stranger for an hour, getting merely a few minutes' advice and another appointment at the end, and then paying for that? And when that person has tried 2, 3, half-a-dozen professionals, how do you think they begin to feel then?
Your commandments here strike me as being like an extrovert's advice to an introvert: "these are my values, and you must live by them! It is unacceptable for you to not go to parties!"
If a person wants to change, then perhaps you might be of some help to them -- and then only if you spend more than a minute's effort banging out a comment on your keyboard. I haven't yet finished reading his screed, but so far it sounds to me like he is not only not asking for help, he is openly rejecting it, in which case I doubt anybody else should have much to say about it.
Yes, many shrinks suck. It sucks dealing with them. I'll still shout "Find professional help" if that's what it'll take for that person. And that's the case here.
You(OP) don't go and write a whole long screed how you'd like to be left alone to then justify said screed on a site like HN without actually, at some level, wanting to interact with people.
Which means you(OP) have an issue - what you(OP) say and what you do is not congruent. Find somebody you can relate to, and ask for their advice. Doesn't need to be a shrink. Priest, Guru, Life Coach, whatever works for you. Work out which one of the two you want, and then live accordingly.
Edit: Clarifying "you"
I can't tell from your comment if you think I'm the author, but just FYI, I'm not.
> I'll still shout "Find professional help" if that's what it'll take for that person. And that's the case here.
OK, here's the thing, and it's really the only point I care to try to make here: telling someone to find professional help is not helpful. In fact, it's probably harmful, because it's the number one, most predictable piece of advice anybody can expect to get. So, being told over and over again to "find professional help" -- a task which is dramatically more difficult than the effort required to write those three words -- just makes people want to talk about their problems openly even less. i.e., "I'd talk about it, but they'll just tell me to find professional help, I really don't need to hear that again."
It's also harmful in that it's another kind of a dismissal. Surely you can see that "find professional help" could be interpreted as another way of saying, "Go away, I can't help you"? "Go find someone else and pay them to listen to you." -- I'm sure this isn't what you or anyone else means to say, but this is what it sounds like to someone with depression.
Thanks for spelling out the truth. For those who are young and impressionable, listen to this man. Let me paraphrase his two points,
1) Being a nice person will not only earn you any affection you crave but the opposite, contempt for being an agreeable person.
2) Professional help is an oxymoron. Psychiatrists waste money and time.
In my humble opinion, fundamental human problems involve three things, social class, money and sex. Sanitized into our civilized world, it means "pursuing your passion," "entrepreneurship," and "being a good citizen." Shrinks will not grant you any of those things. You have to do the dirty work yourself.
This has not been my experience. I like nice people, and dislike assholes. I know plenty of other people who feel the same. Of course, there are people who are attracted to assholes, but if you're interested in their affection then you might want to take a deep, hard look at why.
"Professional help is an oxymoron. Psychiatrists waste money and time."
There are lots of different types of psychiatrists and psychologists in the US and around the world. The most popular type of therapy in the US right now is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), but there are many, many others. If one therapy (or one therapist) doesn't work for you, that doesn't mean that another won't.
"In my humble opinion, fundamental human problems involve three things, social class, money and sex."
You might want to look at Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.[1] From most basic to the highest needs, they are:
* Physiological needs
* Safety needs
* Love and belonging
* Esteem
* Self-actualization
* Self-transcendence
Your "social class, money and sex" only really cover the bottom four levels, and completely ignore the need for self-actualization and self-transcendence. While Maslow's heirarchy is controversial, I personally think it's quite myopic to ignore the need many people have for getting beyond the lower levels in to the quest for self-discovery, self-development, and self-transcendence.
"Shrinks will not grant you any of those things. You have to do the dirty work yourself."
Psychologists and psychotherapists can certainly never "grant" you anything except a (hopefully) sympathetic ear. A good therapist can also help you get insight and offer good advice, but you will certainly have to do a lot of hard work in the therapy session and as homework. To think that on your own you can achieve anywhere near the amount of insight, healing, and growth that you could with the help of a good therapist is (usually and for most people) overly optimistic.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
On the other hand, finding a good professional takes money and energy and time, and many people lack one of the three. Commanding them to spend money, energy, or time isn't likely to make them do something they can't do.
If you've reached the stage where you no longer want help, then having random people on the internet tell you to go to a professional doesn't do you any good.
Being a jerk gets you nothing. The jerks who achieve success do so in spite of being a jerk. (There is more to life than your affect.)
People who say things like "nice guys finish last" are not actually being nice, they are being martyrs. There's a difference.
Yes, "ask a professional" can be misread as "I don't care about that person". What it means when I say that is "I am not qualified to help you. You're in deep shit, and you need help. You really should find somebody who is qualified".
If I happen to know the person, and they're in my area, it comes together with a number or two where they could find somebody competent. And with a clear statement that I expect them to call, plus follow-ups from me if they called. I'm a persistent nag if I have to :)
I'm also pretty clear about the fact that if they keep coming to me with their problem, I expect them to do something about it.
On the Internets, it's hard to do more than say "go see a professional". The OP laid their soul bare, but I don't know them enough to give them any better advice.
You know what sucks worse than trying to find competent professional medical attention in America? Blowing your head off with a gun and leaving your decomposing meat for someone to find and clean up. Those are the stakes here.
This author wrote a novella about watching his life reduce to nothing, then wrapped it in a wordpress, threw a vanity domain up, and submitted it to a hivemind. If it was about the quaint, quirky charms of a minimalist lifestyle then you special electronic snowflakes could give each other all the handjobs you want and nobody would mind.
But as this piece documents severe emotional trauma from a childhood marked by abandonment, drug abuse, emotional abuse, (and probably sexual/physical violence) it seems to -me- that he needs help, is looking for social oxygen, and is trying to figure his situation out.
It's not a pretty picture, and the more he rambles about how his sister won't let him eat ice cream the more confused he's going to be about the issues in his life and the fundamental plumbing in his head. Don't confuse depression with a lifestyle choice.
I think I can help you with your message in some small way by noting that social integration is not good because it's 'normal'. It's good because it's vitally necessary for survival. Human society is entirely synthetic, artificial. We are born depending on others. The doctor. The hospital. Our mothers. We are raised depending on others: the teacher, our classmates, our siblings. We live in structures built by others eating food grown by others.
The interesting contradiction here is between Ken's desire to make money and his desire to withdraw from the world. These are totally incompatible desires. One of them has to give. And given that 'not making money' means, essentially, starvation and death, it suggests that perhaps he should rethink the normalcy of withdrawing so completely from the world.
I would only add this argument to yours, not replace it. Thanks for your comments.
-For some people, writing it all out is therapeutic. That's probably the best time (most suggestible time) to suggest therapy.
-CBT is useful, and the #1 long-term cure for depression. A good CBT therapist is what the author should look for.
-Author is making plans for the future, which is a good sign that things aren't totally dire right now.
He wrote, "In the aftermath of emotional implosion; friends, family, colleagues and even strangers will metamorph into an invasive species from planet Concern," and I thought, "pfft, that must be lovely."
I know that I'm just a stranger on the Internet, but it sounds like you need to find yourself a better peer-group.
One of the weirdest things I've encountered was how much the brain internalizes its existence from a very young age. Without going massively philosophical on people the question of what is 'normal' is really really fluid. Nearly everyone I've met baselines their own childhood experience as 'normal' even though people have widely different sets of acceptable/unacceptable behaviors, language usage, religious views, Etc. These get injected into the pliable and undiscriminating brain of a child, and children of dysfunctional families usually can't express their discomfort as a function of their own upbringing because human brains don't work that way.
So while I agree the author would benefit greatly by deconstructing his earliest inputs and re-contextualizing them in a way that allows him to move forward with his life, that has to happen somewhat on his timeline.
...and you're being abusive under the guise of trying to help.
Aggression is not a good answer and if you can't make your point succinctly without it then now would be a good time to learn. Not to mention the arrogance of presuming you know what's best for someone to the point where you feel you should attempt to force your opinion upon them.
And now I will presumptuously bully my way into forcing my opinion on him with abusive HATECAPS under the self-serving, egotistical guise of trying to help:
AUTHOR. YOU ARE THE SURVIVOR OF CHILDHOOD ABUSE. THIS FACT HAS LED TO INGRAINED BEHAVIORS THAT ARE CAUSING UNDESIRABLE OUTCOMES IN YOUR LIFE. YOU, LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL PEOPLE, REQUIRE A GREATER SOCIAL CONTEXT IN WHICH TO EXPLORE THESE EVENTS, UNDERSTAND HOW THEY TAUGHT YOU MALADAPTIVE EMOTIONAL AND SOCIAL BEHAVIORS, AND PERHAPS MODIFY THEM FOR A GREATER RESULT.
It's the first step to wellness, but people (especially the types that are drawn to technology) put way too much weight in analysis. "Getting better" stalls, more often than not, in analysis. It's why your friend or cousin or mother or whoever tells you they went to therapy for 10 years and accomplished nothing.
The root cause is this: feeling bad about yourself is easier than the pain of actually doing something about it. So if you can stay in analysis mode and take a couple hesitant shuffles in some direction, that's good enough. You'll never get better, but at least you don't have to change.
That's why the author should get into therapy today. With a good therapist, and some willpower, he can begin actually changing his life. As it stands, I expect a couple more blog posts and another existential crisis sometime around Thanksgiving.
He/she doesn't sound depressed - depressed people don't walk 5 miles a day and still want more
It's normal to be a hermit/anachorite/anything, countless people have done it over the centuries (under the pretense/justification of religion)
He/she doesn't really have a writing talent - in fact he/she doesn't seem well read.
Perhaps it would be best to enjoy their alone time, read tons of books. The will to start giving to this cruel world will develop after their teenage angst years when their weltschmerz starts to subside.
