Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?

If anybody used to enjoy working with you and they know of something it, should be easy enough from then on.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown / Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

At 11 I started writing software, with entrepreneurial aspirations helped by my parents. Over my teen years I must have designed a dozen sites I never published. I did alright in school, but I was never on time. At 18, out of high school, I got my first job. I moved to the city, went to college, and flunked out. I couldn't get up for class on time, I couldn't understand the "basic high school review" math course.

So, at 19 I moved back home, worked a year, and moved back to the city to work as a developer. I applied here and there, there was never much interest. I got comfortable, and although ashamed to sickness, I managed to spend the pandemic years not working at all. I suppose my ego and immaturity "prevented" me from working a regular job.

At 23 I moved back to my home town, to work my 3rd job ever, as a cleaner alongside a bunch of teens. After a year of that, I moved to a new big city, swallowed my pride and immediately got another cleaning job. I hoped to move on from that, maybe to software, maybe some new calling.

A new life circumstance hit me like a truck, and I had a very dark year. Stayed at that minimum wage job. 24, 25, moved back home.

The last year I've been trying to improve, taking online courses, going to the gym, building a piece of software that has real value, as in, can actually make money. But, well, I have a hard time believing anything has much of value. I'm 26 now. Spent most of my year "improving", a small portion working.

I maintain the polite fiction because I don't like people asking me why I do the things I do, I don't really know. I guess I do what's easy. A younger me would've chalked it up to "trauma", "anxiety", "depression", or some DSM-able disorder. An older me doesn't believe that at all. But I barely work, don't drive, and I really isolate myself. This was all quite bad before, but after the "circumstance", the last point is especially true.

I know how to get out of the "not working" cycle, I have to get a job first-and-foremost. But I don't know how to get out of the isolation cycle, it's been getting worse and worse. I try and read up on it, but all the advice is about "making friends". That's not really my issue. I feel like an alien, and most everyone drives me insane. Well, at least I can appreciate Kafka.

(After all that, I've never made a dime on software)

It always fought against open source. Embrace, extend, extinguish. It always stifled innovation. Internet Explorer 6. And now, it bought GitHub and then plagiarized all public and private projects hosted on it. GPL cannot exist in a world where you can build a statistical model of the code and mechanically reproduce its functionality while somehow losing the GPL licensing in the process.

Also, calling it "defeatist" has no base in what I wrote. I didn't even write anything about corporations. Abuse has a much simpler description - using a power differential to benefit yourself at other people's expense.