‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’

we evolved to get a trade building and using computers and build a home?

Yeah ADHD is one of the, if not the, most treatable psychiatric conditions.

What you're reading is an increasingly common outcome for young women without guidance and goals coming from a patriarchal society.

All that which entices young women these days - moving, traveling abroad, working in 'passionate' or artistic fields instead of real ones - correlates with moving further away from stable long term relationships, family, and financial security.

And a 3+ year relationship ending dramatically - this is the expected outcome if you don't move to invest in family and create a shared future. God forbid her partner wanted children, a stable life in one location, the security of his partner not going out and acting like a 20-something year old, etc.

But nobody ever dares speak any of this, and while previous generations enforced control, they never explained why, except cryptically through religion. So it's no wonder in secular western societies people just do what they feel, and end up like this.

Now at best this no-longer-young woman will try to reform, change her patterns and behavior, just enough to attract a partner for the latter half of her life. And I'm sure she'll find one, as there are many poor male souls as well who know that a large part of their life and opportunities have passed. But what a sad state of affairs that we glorify and waste our youths, and scramble to pick up the pieces like this.

I'm more or less an atheist by most standards, and I'm okay with that description.

I fundamentally agree with you.

We need things (that we imagine to be) outside of ourselves that are good in order to structure what we do. That otherness can be in the form of God or in the form of ethics, or in the form of whatever we unconsciously pickup as meaningful.

Culturally (in the US at least), I don't think that there are a lot of serious options just laying around for people to pick up if they aren't into religion, and so we unconsciously pick up other people, transient material successes, short term goal fulfillment, or novelty seeking as a substitute for these long term orientations.

When we unconsciously adopt those things (human relationships, solving our short term projects, being smart, or whatever) I think that we're bound to be disappointed because all of those things are pretty finite in what you can do with them: there is always a limit to how close a relationship can be, how healthy your body can be, how much professional success you can attain, and so on.

I have a 17 year old who lives with me, and when he goes off to college, I will be happy. I am glad that I have a lot more in my life than just my children, because in the end it's important that they leave, eventually.

Even your closest human relations need to have limits.

So the choice seems to be between living with short term successes, picking up religion, or doing a lot of intellectual work to try and find meaningful stuff that doesn't have the same frustrating limits as the short-term goals.

At this point, I have been finding that last option much more useful... finally, after two decades of being a dead weight of alienating drag, my degree in philosophy is starting to work out some things.

So, yeah, I think that you're right: an ethic where you place meaning in your life in the wellbeing of humanity in general is a strong idea.

Reiterating something I wrote in another comment: the columnist's response is more than 2,300 words long. The mention of her book is 600 words in, is limited to a single sentence with no mention of what it's even about. And it is in the context of how the columnist fights feelings of inadequacy even during the ostensible high point of her career.