Ask HN: Words of encouragement for someone lost in life?

To put it briefly, you need to become a normal man; normal meaning in the context of human history, not necessarily the current year. A normal man doesn't stare at a screen all day doing STEM stuff. He doesn't play video games. He talks to people, works out, goes into nature, cares about his appearance, is focused on building a family, etc. You can justify anything to yourself with intellect: "Well there's nothing inherently worse about video games than other forms of entertainment, at least I'm engaging with it" or "Working out is vanity and I'm above such things, so I'll just maybe eat less dessert, I don't need to be buff or strong, that's a waste of my brain power and time." You have to stop thinking this kind of thing. It's a cope that has developed throughout your entire life to deal with insecurities. You can be the buff, happy go lucky jock archetype who grills on the weekends with his buddies and his girlfriend, and crucially, you can enjoy being this. I know, "I don't want to be as shallow as a jock, that's not me," but you actually do. You project negative traits onto this kind of life because to think otherwise is to accept your lifestyle is wasted and stupid. They are happy and you are not. You are not superior to them, you are worse, because you are unhappy.

Your instinct knows what to do. It knows that video games are a waste of time. It knows that coding all day is going to make you lonely and undesirable. Why would a woman want to date a guy who's main hobby is typing on a screen? There has been a recent push in society for people to "just do whatever makes you happy and be yourself," and this is the result: a huge swathe of people addicted to dopamine and escapism, who even disdain the idea of "acting" like "someone they're not". What you're not, is happy. Stop doing all that shit that you know is not helping anything. Start doing the shit you think is dumb and vapid yet somehow manages to make everyone happy for all of human history. Hit the gym and talk to a stranger. You will change by acting.

Get off Tinder and go out into the world outside of work, trying organizations, groups, conferences, classes in areas you've ever thought " that looks interesting", " I'd like to try that".....

You will meet people just like you, that share these same interests. There is a high probability you will meet someone as interested in you as you are in them.

The web offers so many ways to find these groups, organizations,..... that were never available before. Being that you are a programmer, you can probably write a routine to give you more options than you need.

I too enjoyed programming and math, which for me was about solving puzzles presented as tasks or problems, getting immersed in a thought machine, and seeing the results. This skill can be expanded into many different vocations and a vocations, a " secret sauce" allowing you to succeed in what ever , how ever you define " success" . Could be sitting in a hammock In Key West after a day of inventing an algorithm to count manatees from drone images during their winter gatherings in Florida, or Bora Bora doing something else. Or working for Hilton and stay for free, or an airline and fly for free. You get the idea.

At 23, you definitely have a whole world ahead of you for as long as the ride lasts. The adventures, puzzles to be figured out, fascinating people to meet; way too many opportunities for others to benefit from your life in ways you cannot imagine. Ending that denies the world those unique aspects only you can create. Seems like a waste to me. Definitely seek professional help if you find yourself thinking about it.

Lots of great reading out there. This has talked me off the ledge more than once.

It’s also ironic that I’ve climbed a lot and never found anyone to date let alone that I get on with as well.

Seriously. There are firms whose entire purpose is to get you to feel the way you do in the hopes it'll drive consumption or move markets. Then you have to take into account that of the people that are actually there, you've already sort of selected yourself out of if you've taken a strong interest in mathematics and programming.

Think about it, how many people do you know actively pursue your stated interests? You're shooting yourself in the foot with the added burden of rejection. This will not help either.

Re:suicide Most people will try to convince it's absolutely the wrong thing and you should seek help immediately. Let me give you a different perspective on suicidal ideation.

Suicidal ideation occurs when what you have and what you've tuned yourself to do begins to approach a local maxima of maladaptation. You need to not think about suicide in the physical sense of I need to end it all, but in the mental sense of "none of the tools in my mental toolbox are sufficient for the challenges I'm facing". This is a signal it's time for radical novelty and lateral thinking/life experience. You need to get out of your comfort zone, and you tried to do that with Tinder, but I'm going to guess that if you got into math and programming at such a young age, you may be a Myers-Briggs NT, and you're probably not at the best place yet to start to really connect on the emotional wavelengths yet. At least not actively, as your emotional faculties are still probably quite raw and poorly integrated into the overall architecture of self. That means you aren't the best at damping their tendencies to destabilize your inner sense of order, which for you, is probably a key component to you being able to recuperate and regenerate the energy you use to interact with the external world.

Do you have any abandoned hobbies? Previously insignificant things you've dismissed out of hand? Music, Art, aesthetics? Basically anything that engages you in processing the patterns and wholeness of a thing. Basically, you need to get in touch with your destabilizing emotional side and let it walk you somewhere different. It'll be frustrating. You'll probably think you suck and you're horrible at it, but over time you'll get a slow trickle of integration to start happening between your emotional aesthetic faculties that you can use as a sort of slider to index your thinking and perception by how you're feeling at the moment. Figuring out how you're feeling at the moment, and what you need to be, is a combined intuitive/sensing function, and you'll start to get a new input stream to systematize that'll keep you busy. The practical upshot is that you'll also be honing and learning about your feelings, and start demystifying them over time, eventually coming to recognize how powerful a change agent they can be for you in terms of mental catalyzation.

If you're not an NT... Meh Can't help much there, but hang in there. It gets better.