Ask HN: When you feel stuck in life

Society puts a lot of pressure on people to follow the social norm; go to school, get a degree, find a job, work the day, get a spouse, buy a house, have 2.4 kids (whatever the average is today), save for retirement, grow old and die. The only mandatory step is the last one.

Based on my observations some people are happy on this path and some people are not, for a myriad of reasons. You are on step 3 and now thinking "wait a minute, is this what I really want?". (Consider yourself lucky to have this question now and not on step 5 or 6 which is a disaster). With out knowing who you really are, what you believe and what you want to do with your life you will be unmotivated, disinterested and ambivalent in your actions. It also leaves you open to falling in with a bad crowd, doing drugs, drinking or mindless sex, etc. as a substitute for a fulfilling life.

Nobody can answer the question of what will make you happy and unfortunately the schools do virtually nothing to help young adults actually achieve adulthood, which I define as being epistemologically independent, i.e you must set aside social and family pressures and think for your self and decide what YOU want to do. Thinking is a solitary act. You stand apart from society and process information, decide what is true and false or right and wrong. When you are done you can share your results with others (to share what you have learned or to get help if you get stuck) but you can't share the process, it is strictly yours. In today's world, finding solitude and being alone is become harder to achieve. Society actually is suspicious of loners but, at root, a thinker is a loner. Many people (the most unhappy as I can tell) are actually afraid being alone. Here is a good article on the subject https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/#.VUc... but I would argue that being a good follower requires solitude too. We can't all be leaders but a follower must still think to wisely choose who to follow.

With that long preface here is my advice;

1) Read that article I referenced above and reevaluate how "connected' you are with social media, forums, email, smart phones, etc. Maybe its time to take a break and be alone for a bit. Take a short vacation, a cabin in the woods or at the lake and completely unplug and be alone with your thoughts without interruption for a few days. Become comfortable with your self. Alone.

2) Read Ayn Rand's books "The Virtue of Selfishness" and "Philosophy Who Needs it" and ignore the social pressure to dismiss her out of hand without actually reading what she said. Think for yourself and decide if her ideas are true or false. Ignore everything she wrote on politics, its a distraction to your current problem.

3) Start writing a daily journal. You can't understand your self if your thoughts, feelings, emotions, motivations are all floating around in your head without clear identification and analysis. If you do only one thing on my list do this.

This is known as ennui - and is perfectly normal.

I think there is one solution that works very well.

Do something that benefits others - focus on how you can help others - maybe go onto one of the Stack Overflow boards and answer some questions. Join an online community, say in the start up scene, and give advice to others based on your degree for example.

Remember - this too will pass - the sense of ennui is temporary. Don't equate what you feel with who you are. This is a temporary feeling - just keep going, even if you can't see the point. Eventually this feeling will pass and you will have a huge sense of achievement that you passed through this.

I agree with others, recreational drugs are a definite no-no (alcohol very much so) you need to keep your mind strong not weaken it.

Speak to your doctor/psychiatrist if this changes from ennui to depression - it's always good to have support.

My best wishes for you, you can pass through this, just be patient with life and yourself.

It's not surprising that you're not happy with your education, that's a "general" degree to be an "office pion" (I'm using the unpleasant description for a reason). What you did was go to school for something/anything that got you a degree... now you don't know what you want to do (and do with it). That's backwards thinking. You need to find what you're passionate about and then get an education for a job that does that. If you don't like being an office administrator... why get a BA degree? Right? You need to try a number of jobs, experiment (for not too long, remember you're looking for your Permanent job... a.k.a. Career) with different jobs. Spend an afternoon and think about the times you were really happy... is there a job doing that? Is there a job relating to that? FYI: The age you figured out that "you don't want to do this anymore" is immaterial, your first step was realizing this fact. Now do something about it!! and go enjoy your life instead of just slogging through it.

Your degree is all about making sure you transform a bunch of effort into a scalar value on a bank's hard drive somewhere which represents your company net revenue. Put another way, your degree teaches you how to better execute an extremely lossy compression algorithm which reduces the complex, multidimensional value of what your company is trying to offer the world down to a scalar and then evaluates your success based on the magnitude of that scalar.

If that sounds inherently depressing, that's because it is. Scalar money commerce is an old hack and a complete wreck that has not kept up with the times, and you just got a degree in optimizing your endeavors to it.

As grim as that might sound in one sense, in another, you're also one of our only hopes for getting past scalar money commerce to a better system.

Another way to think of your degree is as a way to isolate the people inside a company from both the real and the psychological ravages of scalar money commerce, or what I think any entrepreneur would agree is "the roller coaster."

This is an extremely noble pursuit if that is your primary goal, as opposed to focusing on the maximization of that scalar net revenue number. And in fact, I'd argue that if you make this your goal, the key to treating your depression will be to find the right group of people worth protecting.

i am in your shoes - so I'm going to Guyana as a volunteer to fly an air ambulance - pretty sure that 90+ degree days, malaria, zika, piranha, sick and injured people - will all help me to feel less stuck :-)