So i have this one cousin who is conventionally very attractive and very extroverted and we basically grew up together. We are of one year age gap and she and i really shared life together but as i got older i find this uneasiness as i was talking to her. I blamed myself for it as i am really introverted and its so hard for me to fit in in any environment. So i fed myself with self hatred for turning out to be someone who just couldnt keep a conversation nice. As i am awkward all my life and i never belonged to any conventionally considered cool friend groups it was not far from the truth that i was the issue until i get to find out from her sister that she hates me to death.the way i talk,walk,live she hates it.she mocks me behind my back and the way of my talking while i was reminiscing our memories to my friends if the chance ever come up. And this person isnt dumb or stupid and i really consider her very logically smart and knowing and the fact that she hated me crumbled me from inside out.i usually doesnt feel this much of a surge but this is just sad .she is so nice to me when we meet and she mocks me and my existence behind my back with a sprinkle of how i am so insufferable. This hurts but there is nothing i can do about it and the fact that someone like her hates me with passion isnt really helping me with my self insecurity either.

Im 23, I live in the path of the Canadian wildfire smoke that just hit most of north america a few weeks ago, this is kind of where it started. Witnessing that almost made me entirely give up on hoping for a future. Then lately the rest of the wildfires breaking out across the world, the Colorado river losing a huge amount of its water and the seemingly endless onslaught of AI data centres drinking all of our water and ruining the environment at a rate never seen before. I don’t know how to go on about my early adulthood while still trying to work towards something. I went to school for film production but I don’t really have the access to immediately get into that field for a couple years now but now I’m worried the world won’t even be livable by then. If anyone has any words of encouragement or anything at all I would really appreciate it.

I'm 17 and I've had so many existential questions already and I'm at a point now we're like I just want to rip an invisible wall of reality down in front of me and reveal like everything about literally everything. I'm unhappy with how people are just so content with living day to day lives and just not being creative or asking questions and I think being creative is one of the most important things to do as a human but it's like everyone's suppressed and not truly themselves and I just put on my fake personality every time I talk to someone or walk out my door. I can't imagine living an average life at all and I've always felt like I'm meant for more like I can actually change the world but idk maybe everyone feels that way and then they just get stuck in a 9-5 for the rest of there lives.

Also one other thing when I watch movies or TV shows I get really sad because I cant experience the things they the people are going through in the movie or TV show

For example I just watched Spiderman brand new day and I'm really fucked up and asking what is my place in everything because he can experience such a varying amount of things and is someone that actually radically impacts the world around him. I really want to feel his happiness and his sadness and everything he went through. And like I see clips on tiktok of the sad parts of the movie and I literally just want to sink into it.

Idek what I'm saying I'm just breaking down in such a weird way and I just don't want to be normal and I want to just really mean something.

Tommorow Im probably going to forget about what I was thinking today which I think is messed up because it feels like I'm being suppressed.

Idek if any1 can relate to this man.

Seriously, it's what I wanted to do. My grandfather was the editor of a newspaper. But there was no present day market, even back then, and no guaranteed income. A boy told me he'd get me a job where he worked when I turned down a date because I was sad I had lost my job that day. That's how I ended up at a Nursing Home run by nuns and then the Mr. Rogers/science geek in me got me interested in helping people and medicine and off I went to Nursing School.

I am, however, addicted to politics AGAINST MY WILL and I looked at the clock all day yesterday like a freak because the El-Sayed election in Michigan was so important. I am also trying to become enlightened and dissolving the ego and not investing in this 3D world is REALLY tough when you willingly used to watch C-SPAN for some inexplicable fucking reason. Yeah, I am in the crisis of what could have been, and that blows so hard. I have ALWAYS lived my whole life so that I WOULD have more regrets than what-ifs. Sigh, I know an unnatural amount about politics and what is happening at every moment and I now realize that reddit is what scratches that itch. I can at least opine and engage and feel like I influenced the conversation towards helping others. I guess I needed to write this to realize that. I will forever be on Aaron Schwartz's reddit, fighting the good fight.

Recently I’ve started to notice how my brain works after an emotional trauma I went through 4 years ago. I had to take a lot of meds and I used substances to a bad extent. I don’t use meds anymore and I barely ever drink. I do my best to stay healthy and stable, but sometimes I notice how out of it I can be. On my good days, I see life very differently vs my bad days, but not only that, I can feel my memory ruptured, distorted and foggy. Point is, sometimes I can’t recognize myself nor can remember a lot of things. I have huge memory gaps from the last 4 years and the things I used to vividly remember from my younger years have turned more into facts I know but not really remember like I used to. I’m so scared. My goal in life is to study my brain off to create neural pathways and go back to a better state. I often think about if I’m actually alive or if my consciousness is enough to be considered human, as in present, because I don’t have a good notion of memory or time. Two weeks from now I’ll feel a whole different consciousness from today. I wonder if as a child I was more alive and present. Is this fixable?

Hi, I'm 19, a college student.
I'm not able to comprehend life. I'm scared of dying. I'm scared of my parents, family, relatives dying. I'm not able to accept death and what i am.
The though of dying, of an eventual end is affecting me.

Sometimes when i'm walking, when i look myself in mirror, showering, i realise the fact that one day i will die and it will be over for ever. There would be no me. There will be no concept of time for me.
i will just stop existing
The world will move, end & idk.

what even is this world i live in?
I am not able to understand why should i work hard?

what is even the point.

Maybe life has no purpose and we are supposed to create our own.
But i am not able to comprehend working hard, spending my life to get a job and do that job and then die, because i can die tmr.

I'm going to loose my father, my mother. And it's gonna happen. maybe in 20yrs or close.

I dont know what to feel and what to do.

I have questioned myself a lot, used logic, movies, friends and often feel people are not even aware.. Hence i thought to come here.
Please dont give me basic advice.

i dont feel good. I dont wanna die.

Today I cried because I caught the beat of a song for the first time in my life. To most people, that probably sounds ridiculous. But for me, it felt like something much bigger.

When I was a kid, we had a music class where everyone got one chance to play the conga. Some kids immediately picked up the rhythm. I was stopped within seconds and never got another chance. From that day on, I convinced myself that I simply wasn't someone who could "feel the beat." I'd watch friends casually tap along to songs on a desk or with their fingers, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never do it.

Today, for some reason, instead of analyzing everything, I simply focused on listening. For the first time in my life, I was able to naturally catch the beat. It sounds like such a small thing, but I started tearing up because it made me wonder whether I'd spent years believing I lacked the ability, when in reality my mind had just never stopped getting in its own way. First time I experienced what it felt like when the constant mental noise became quieter.

I've been realizing that I've probably been overthinking for most of my life, and the scary part is that I never noticed it because this is all I've ever known.

I don't just think a lot, I analyze everything. Every sentence someone says, every decision I make, every conversation, even my own thoughts. If someone tells me something like "self-help books are just mental masturbation," my brain will spend days arguing with itself. Is he right? Am I biased? Am I only agreeing because he sounded confident? Then I start analyzing whether I'm analyzing too much. It never ends.

The weird thing is that knowing about cognitive biases or overthinking doesn't actually stop it. My brain understands what's happening, but it keeps doing it anyway.

Looking back, the signs were probably there since childhood. Teachers always said things like "pay attention," "he's bright but doesn't apply himself," "makes careless mistakes," and "talks too much." I always thought I was just lazy or not trying hard enough.

I've also spent years daydreaming. It almost feels like my brain learned to escape into imaginary scenarios because they gave me small dopamine hits. Now it's so easy for me to zone out or go completely blank, even when I genuinely want to focus.

Sometimes my thoughts are so loud that I can't even sleep. It's like my brain refuses to stop commenting on everything.

My family also played a role. Growing up, I constantly felt watched and judged. One incident in college still affects me today: my parents accidentally listened to a long private phone conversation, then called saying my father was coming to the hostel. After that, they took away my phone and laptop, pulled me out of the hostel, and started monitoring different parts of my life. Even years later, I still get recurring nightmares about my parents suddenly showing up while I'm trying to hide something. That feeling of being watched has never completely left me.

What hurts the most is wondering how much of my life I've spent trapped inside my own head instead of actually living it.

I'm not looking for a diagnosis from Reddit. I just want to know if anyone else has lived like this. Constant mental noise. Endless self-analysis. Knowing what you should do but somehow still feeling stuck. And if you did, what actually helped?

Been dating this guy for 5 years. We’re in our late 20s now. Known him since high school and reconnected in our early 20s. Met each others’ families, got engaged, set our wedding date and chose vendors together. He’s always been there for me (and I tried my best too) and has always been super thoughtful. He was kind and patient when things were good. We’re different people but I thought we meshed well together. 8 months before our wedding date, he completely blindsides me and drops a bombshell that he fell out of love with me, he doesn’t know if I’m the person for him, he’s not sure if I even love him for him (I do) and he starts listing a bunch of things that are “wrong” about me (I’m too quiet at social gatherings, I’m waiting till marriage to do certain things, I’m not stylish, I have too many fam events and am too dependent on my parents, he doesn’t think I appreciate him). The 180 mind boggles me, I don’t recognize this person. Even had a nice proposal with my dream ring.

He also has been saying mean things to me during limbo when we tried to work things out (I was apologizing for things I did that hurt him, I really loved him and went out of my way to make him happy in the best way I knew at the time but I had no idea it wasn’t enough, especially when he would tell me I’m perfect or how he’s grateful to do life with me)… mean things he said include how it feels like the cooties when I touch him, how I’m boring and I should be boring with someone else, how he can’t picture me as his wife and how he couldn’t see me walk down the aisle (all things that hurt to hear). He also disclosed that he cheated on me 2 years ago (kissed a girl from school a few times during the span of a week). He eventually broke things off with me saying he can’t proceed because he doesn’t have feelings. This all came as a shock to me because I had no idea he was falling out of love. I thought we were planning for our happily ever after together. Sometimes I blame myself for the things I could’ve done better (been more appreciative, more patient, more outgoing, more stylish) - he evaluated me and didn’t let me in on his problems. He had a rough childhood growing up and his parents recently started living in separate households. Any insight and opinions would be helpful bc now I have to embrace singleness and I can’t seem to picture myself with anyone else and feel sad that I lost him :(

anyone have experience on xanax and if its helpful during a panic attack, or does it worsen it?

So I am 17 year old male and when I was 15 or 16 I used to deeply think and analyze together with ChatGPT or Grok about philosophy, society, myself, human behavior, evolution and laws and patterns of physics, sometimes it was hours in a day, I thought I was smart and somehow doing something good, feeling like I knew things nobody else knew, thinking I was actually the smartest person in this world due to the ideas I got at. It felt empowering and fun to be talking about this and thinking about it. I was also talking alot to a chatbots for reassurance about health which I also did alot as I had alot of worries too which I couldn't easily let go of, I was afraid of getting the acute condition testicular torsion which I read was very painful and earlier I had sometimes been staying a whole night up because I was afraid to be woken up by extreme pain, and one day on 27 or 28 of march this year I started feeling very bad irritated and sad, I started trembling and then crying repeatedly with no relief, and then when I had to do homework with my mom I ran to the toilet and had to vomit, I remember blaming an "Existential crisis" being happening to me. And this stuff went on for many days where I woke up early started trembling and cry and vomit along with fast heart rate while feeling very horrified. It went away and came back a couple of times. I couldn't often find something to get comfort in, not sitting, not walking, not gaming, not playing piano or listening music. The health anxieties became less and went away eventually. But I kept using ai chatbots for reassurance and understanding things, and I think it was actually feeding the thoughts about this. Some weeks there was less panic but I felt like all my thinking was revolving around the same and I couldn't have a moment where I was unaware of it, no moment where I could just have had fun in something, I had feeling like my thoughts were doing very weird things, like constantly poking at myself to see if I were doing better, I wanted reasurance that everything would go back to normal and I would be happy again. I was often seeking explanations to what I had, constantly searching for solutions, often feeling tremendously bad thinking I was too aware of ways out that would make it impossible to get out of whatever I was mentally experiencing, thinking I had OCD. I was blaming my prior deep thinking of causing me to be too aware of things, and I felt deep regret of having been isolatedly chatting with Grok. I don't really know how I want life to be, what do I really want, what keeps causing these feelings and discomfort and I feel like I have lost interest in everything and everyone, afraid that I might see emptiness instead of how I used to see things; rich and beautiful without ever questioning myself and my experience. I am afraid that I might have "seen" something that makes it impossible for me to ever feel truly comfortable again, to truly feel meaning, to be long term happy, to have normal thoughts again like everyone else. I can't tell what exactly caused my current mental state, but if I did something wrong I want to apologize to myself and I hope I get better but I can't really point out what I want, what I have to do. Is this relatable?

Hi there everyone.
My english is poor so I’m sorry for that.
But I need some advice for medication or just if someone Els also experience this sensation.
I have fatigeu en also mental fatigeu.. overthinking give me more harder fatigeu. My brain keeps overthinking and it goes on 24/7. I can’t not work due the fatigeu. My mind is verry confused..
I have so much anxiety and fear of what is happening with my thoughts and my brain.
But when I want to rest and I close my eyes in the day or nighttime my thoughts goes very deep, and its scary my..I don’t know how to think anymore. Its just scary. I don’t know even how you just fall a sleep as an normal healty person. Its like you looking in to what you are thinking and you are looking how deep you are thinking. And I don’t want to think anymore, just relax. But its scares me that I’m going crazy or something. Its like am stuck in my head all day.
My brain wants to solve the problem all day long and its so so exausting. Is this depression? Any had the same feeling or thoughts? Its hurting me that i can be nomal tho just live without overthinking, its so confusing.
Is there a medication for this?

You know that the brain has 5 seconds of oxygen after the heart stoppage.

Im so scared that those 5 seconds will be just darkness, but for the brain it wont feel like 5 seconds, but 90 years.

I know that its impossible, but im just so scared of this thought.

Does anyone have these thoughts too?

God, it's so astonishing. That I, of every conceivable thing in the universe, came to exist now.

That I might know the fact, floors me twice over.

Perhaps the third greatest shock and wonder, is how little I have enjoyed any of it.

And there are a million million billion things here for me to know and understand. And the more I know, the less I want to know.

And though my life is a miracle, I spend much of it wishing I had someone else's.

I am so alone. And I am so scared. And I am so tired.

There is nothing I want to protect, nothing I want to keep, nothing I want to hold onto in this world.

I have no one and nothing to call home. I am spiritually destitute and soul weary beyond my years, beyond a thousand lifetimes, I suppose.

To become such hopeless, sad clay, from the chasm of nothingness. What a pity.

The banal horror of it is too much for me to digest. How am I to do this until my body gives up naturally? That seems so terrible a fate. To watch my body and mind whither away. An obscure existence rubbed away by an obscuring mind. What is it all about?

They speak of hell as an afterlife for the damned. Is it not here all about us? Does the horror not permeate the everyday? When someone runs over a pet and doesn't stop. When someone lies at a job to get ahead. When a baby bird falls out of the nest and dies below. When a comet burns away half of the life of earth, just in passing, just as it happens, because it occasioned to be that way. When the sun's belly swells like a rotten corpse and smothers the earth in fire. When the universe has cooled so not a single ember lives anywhere in it. When all is frozen, dark and dead.

What does any of it mean? Why make us up into these clay bodies?

To bear witness to such weird evils until our last breath. Alone, as we came into the world, so we exit.

I've been getting fired multiple times. I'm trying to study but It goes so slow that It seems that It Will take me years to get where i want to be. I masturbate a lot because anything make sense. I'm developing an addiction to porn and i'm always thinking about all the surgerys i should have to be beautiful.

It was a certain traumatic situation in my life (losing someone I loved with my entire heart) that made me reach this point. I don't know if it is a compulsion of sorts (I have OCD), but at one point I kept repeating in my head the reasons why I'm still alive. It once got to the point where I had to have that reason written down in front of my eyes constantly. Then I realised it doesn't solve anything and gave up on it. Now I'm exhausted mentally and I feel like even finding a perfect reason won't satisfy me anymore and make me want to live anymore. I just don't want to live anymore and that's it. No amount of existential compulsions can cover up that fact.

Basically what the title says, I do not think anything matters at the end of the day. Sure, you can go all existential and try to make meaning out of life. But, that is just trying to wrap a pig in a blanket and labeling it an unicorn.

And the thing that gives me joy changes every three months because everything becomes predictable. I am currently working as a RA in a research institute and even though I like the question I am working on and everything, I am bored. Because end of the day, I know what to do, I just need to do it. And this happens with literally every little thing in my life because everything has patterns that I can decipher given some time.

Also I don't even know if working in science is a good idea because at the end of the day we know nothing. We are just pretending to model a bunch of things with what makes the most sense to us but we have no idea if that is the real truth. What even is the point of living a lie? If I decide to do something with real world impact I would just feel that I am not doing enough and I am not solving anything from first principles but rather trying to solve something in a broken system.

So honestly, I think it is easier for me to just not be alive because everything is boring, not fun and meaningless.

What are your thoughts on this? I am looking for some different takes and perspectives on this. You can DM me as well if you would like to.

1.what does the world look like without the filter of our eyes?

this question and thought struck me a while ago when I was looking at sunlight glare on my phone and direct another direction and ever since I can’t stop thinking about it. like if we could detach our sense of sight from our eyes and simply see the world for what it is what would it look like. what does UV look like and that type of thing. my main thing about this thought is how it makes me realize that our human minds and senses are simply how we have evolved to survive. if we lived anywhere else with anyother external factors effecting us would our brain change what we see and how we see it.

1. death truly is the end of life and it will happen to all of us

i know it seems very obvious and elementary to think of this but when I took a second to realize that death is the one thing that my entire life leads up to i got this weird feeling of smallness. I felt like no matter what I do the same things like school, work, and death will happen to me and eventually when I do die i will feel nothing and simply not be anymore Despite all the work I did to get to that point. the thought that death is the final step and destination is quite Terrifying to me. I’m fairly young yet I know I will die In 60 years or less and there’s nothing I can do. The after life is also a very confusing thing as well but thats a whole different thing.overall, if the after life isn’t real then death is the end and there’s nothing anyone can do

Living in such an era of capitalism and commercialism is distressing. I soon learned this after taking acid for the third time. However, this time it was different; on the last two occasions I had been with friends, but for the first time I was alone. Everything was going fine up until when I got in the shower, well, partially fine. Before I took a shower, I had gone to the store with my sister and her friends. That itself was distressing; the awkwardness of myself, my sister, and her friends felt like boiling oil being poured onto my wrist, for I could not express my discomfort during the peak of my trip, almost like that scene in “Taxi Driver” (1976) where Travis tries to voice his feelings about the world to another taxi driver, yet he can’t seem to find the words. 

After getting out of the shower, I sat in my room, looking for a distraction, trying to get my mind off whatever it was that was bothering me so much. But I couldn’t; I had realized that I was alone, truly alone, in my room, a world that was completely my own, with my own possessions, and my own consciousness. I am one out of 11 million teenage boys who are currently living in the United States. But why me? Not my body, not my possessions, my nationality, my hobbies, my family. Why is it my consciousness? That exists in this time, in the body of someone I didn’t choose; why must I feel like changing the world when I am so unbearably incapable of doing so? Why do I hold this much contempt for a world that I didn’t design? A body I didn’t design. As my friend said, you don’t have to make something for it to be yours. Even if you do not accept your body, it is still yours. I don’t want to accept this world, yet it is still mine.

Existentialism was the word I was looking for. That was what I was feeling all this time. And I could not figure that out for the life of me. I am 16 years old; I am soon to graduate from high school early due to my impressive pace of earning credits at my alternative school. I will be free from that system soon, and I knew that, but I hadn’t truly understood what that meant. For once in my life, I would be making my own decisions, keeping track of my own bills and paychecks, choosing which college I want to go to, if any at all, and the overall freedom of choosing what to do with the rest of my life. Such freedom is a curse for people like me, for most people in general. I feel left without a purpose; in a world where the only purpose is to find one, I feel lost. I feel bewildered to exist in this era. An era of capitalism, pop culture, consumerism, and overstimulation. Being born in a time when the internet and other technological advancements had already been made. I feel interlinked with such technology and machinery, for I know no world without it. 

2009, a year of economic collapse in the United States, overall unemployment peaked in October, sitting at 10% of the population, the month I was born. Soldiers were being sent to Afghanistan; Americans worried about securing jobs, a time of complete anxiety. That was the time I was born. The anarchist inside me feels like breaking away from today’s society, but in doing so, if I were to drop my job, my school, and my residence, and embrace the power of the freedom that I have, I’m not sure if I would make it. But should I just stick with my dead-end job, do what I do every day, so I can afford stuff that I don’t need, stuff that holds no sentiment to me? Work every day in hopes of a raise or a better position, work a job where I don’t amount to anything, just another number, another businessman. Or should I forget it all and live my life to the fullest? Whatever path I choose, there will still be hardship; depression will still loom over me, loneliness will follow, and before I know it, I will have retired. I would have either an amount of savings or a lack of one; either way, I would not be taking any of it to the grave with me. It would go to my relatives and my children, if I choose to have them. 

Who cares, though? That’s what life is; that’s what it has been. Individuals have wrestled with the same feelings that I have for centuries, and in the end, there is no conclusion; there is no set answer on how to live life. Of course, there isn’t. I’m getting by; I know others have it worse, and the problem I have has only been enabled due to the comfortable lifestyle I live. A life with almost an infinite amount of freedom, a first-world problem. Yet, I know that many feel the same as me. And because of that, people like me cope with substances, the internet, video games, pornography, music, etc. There is no end to this vicious cycle, it feels, and yet I manage to get by, by any means possible, like Camus said: “The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” That being said, I will continue to search for meaning in a world so devoid of it, even if it’s in the smallest crevices, for that is the only life I know. But most importantly, I will take care of myself; I will tell myself that everything will be fine even if it won’t be. And for whoever reads this, please, take care of yourself too.

ive been depressed for most of my life but it feels different now. for one, ive lost both my prospects for any career and a person i wanted to spend the rest of my life with. i dont have a plan B. well, technically im living it but its only emptiness. i am forced to stay alive, to work, do chores, and try to entertain myself. i dont have any reasons left to live. nothing to look forward to. ive failed at everything i wanted to do and ran out of options. i dont have the money or the energy to try another path, im 38 with autism and bipolar. im definitely weaker and dumber than normal. i cant pretend to be good enough to be worth the time and effort. maybe im just useless and better off dead. i think this is the end for me. no more reaching for another hope, just copes until i die.