I never done it, I mean games like baldur’s gate and cyberpunk were tabletop games, but I just never experienced table top gaming enough to know the difference (and the video game’s mechanic is not always allowed by GM’s).
Maybe you could try finding a group to play co-op BG3 with online. Could try the Steam BG3 community or Larian’s discord.
There is a risk of pushing the losers deeper into depression.
There is no easy way out of depression. Just take it day by day. Do something you enjoy and relax. Do little things to improve your life. Avoid stress and anyone that stresses you out.
I think having people who aren’t assholes and people who I can relate with would help, but in Taiwan such people are like unicorns.
Yeah, I feel that. Maybe it’s my age but I don’t really click with most people. I’ve felt isolated most of my adulthood. Such is life my friend.
“When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.”
Reiner Knizia
How’s everyone doing?
I’m doing pretty good recently. Physically in great shape with little nagging injuries besides this plantar fasciitis in my right food. It actually doesn’t even hurt when I’m active more when I don’t move too much.
Business is good as summer time is our peak season.
Not too many lows these days. Enjoyed a nice vacation in Thailand which was nice. Now back to work again and it’s super busy
Easy to fight depression when you got time/money for stuff like vacations.
Been wanting to just go to Europe to see some sights, meet interesting people, and escape this damned heat, but unlike many of you, I lack the money to even go to a nearby island, let alone Europe.
Does not solve depression. It can make your life better if you’re happy and content but it doesn’t solve your underlying issue of YOU if you’re depressed and don’t like yourself.
And you’re not going to get time or money by feeling sorry for yourself
Or being told that when someone have no time for me it’s because they despise me and so want to be polite about it. Then when a lot of people do it, to the point that all I do is play video games because there’s nothing else to do (how do I socialize without visiting establishments that cost heaps of money to do so?)
You might argue video games cost money, but they don’t cost THAT much, and is certainly cheaper than visiting establishments.
Lots of people have given you advice on this, much of it useful or at least well-intentioned. Your standard response is to find reasons why you can’t do what they’ve suggested. You must realise that, with this attitude, people’s patience is going to wear thin.
It is of course hard to do things when you’re depressed. It’s easy to slip into a habit of just complaining and blaming the world around you for everything. The problem is that it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: people don’t like you because you’re always whining and won’t do anything to help yourself, so you drive away the very people who are inclined to be cordial towards you. Nobody wants to be around depressed people, and it’s nobody’s duty to do so. The universe owes you nothing, and healthy individuals will cut from their lives anyone who brings them down. Demanding that people like you, or trying to shame them for rejecting you, is a really bad move. The only way out of this is to become the sort of person that other people like. You then find yourself in a virtuous cycle of positive progress, instead of drifting down the plughole.
It’s entirely under your control. What do you want to do?
If you genuinely want to snap out of this, I can offer you two simple things to try right now.
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Learn how to stop having negative conversations with yourself in your head. Stop whining, both out loud and in private. If you feel yourself going down that road, think of something you can be grateful for - you do, for example, have all your limbs, you’re not blind or deaf, and you’re not crippled with age. You have a roof over your head and food to eat. A billion people don’t even have that much. Focus on these things and be thankful for them.
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Try to get some good, drug-free sleep. You appear to have messed up your body and mind with all kinds of “medicines”, and the last thing you need is more of them. Learn how to relax and sleep naturally, and try to sleep 8-9 hours a day - but stick to a schedule and don’t just wallow in bed. Not sure if I’ve suggested this before, but check youtube for “self-hypnosis” walkthroughs. They’re basically just a therapist talking to you in a calm voice and getting you to relax and drift off to sleep. It sounds daft, but this simple thing can at least give you sufficient mental energy to face up to some real-world problems and fix them.
That’s why depression is such a bad thing. It makes people not want to be around you which makes you even more depressed. Then there’s no way out and suicide starts becoming more and more attractive.
Do you avoid people just because they have cancer? Can cancer patients just “pick themselves up by their bootstrap” and that the cancer will cure itself? Ask Steve Jobs that.
I’m really hesitant to bother responding to this because giving advice to someone who isn’t yet willing to make the necessary changes just seems so futile (as with your response to @Andrew0409’s helpful post above).
I do hope that eventually you’ll run out of excuses and start making an effort to listen to people’s advice and improve things for yourself. As already noted, you’re really the one who needs to do that — there’s no point waiting for others to do it for you, or expecting everyone else to change because you have no control over that.
As to the money issue, perhaps it’s time for you to consider looking for a job or reliable source of income. I’m aware you don’t want that, but a lot of other people aren’t doing their jobs for fun either.
I know I’m certainly not, but if I want money I need to work. That’s just how it is. If I spent most of every day just messing around/playing computer games/riding around to places so I don’t need to spend my own money on AC, I’d be totally broke and unable to afford vacations too. So I choose not to, even though it means doing work I don’t particularly enjoy.
Even with working, it’s not like I can just bugger off to dawdle around Europe doing nothing for a month or two whenever I want. I’d struggle to afford that, so when I take vacations, which isn’t that often, they tend to be shorter and in cheaper places like Thailand or the Philippines. And yes, those places are hot and you don’t like that. I don’t much like hot weather either, but that’s how it is and there’s little point me complaining about it. You shouldn’t really try to guilt-trip people because they have jobs and can afford to take vacations.
Anyway, there must be some things you could do that are more productive than what you’re currently doing. I suggest trying to figure out what they are. Seems better than just waiting around for someone to hand you free money (if you figure out a way to make that happen, I’d like to hear it too).
Might also be worth reading through your previous threads on this topic, like the following one (I think there are many, many more). You’ve had a lot of advice in those threads, and I suspect you might have gotten more here if you’d shown any inclination to listen to previous advice.
Then you have only two choices, don’t you? Get sucked down into the void, or do something about it.
There is no ‘treatment’ for depression, no magic wand that a doctor can wave to make it go away; and in your particular case it has some very clear underlying causes. People aren’t berating you for your ‘moral failings’ etc; they’re trying to point out to you that if (for example) people dislike you doing XYZ, then stop doing XYZ. You’re depressed because you actually have a pretty clear-headed assessment of where you’re at and where you’re going. It would have been a lot easier if you’d dealt with this 10 years ago, but it’s not too late. You can do this, but you’ve got to put the effort in.
You do, I’m afraid, have a fairly large task ahead of you. But the way to perform any large task - particularly if you’re depressed, which saps your willpower - is to break it down into very small pieces, and work through them one by one.
I agree completely with what @finley wrote in his second paragraph — if you want more people to enjoy spending time with you, you have to make yourself more enjoyable, or at least tolerable, to be around.
That applies to everyone, not just you, though I think a lot of us learn much of this stuff earlier in life by people telling us when we’ve done something they find annoying. I don’t think you really listen to this kind of feedback and I suspect that’s part of the issue, but that is something you could improve if you chose to. Less complaining/negativity would likely help too, even if that initially just means not complaining about something you want to complain about.
We can’t really force people to like us, but I think it is possible to make it easier, even for you.
I guess a good solution is just bottle everything up, treat it like top secret classified information, to be shared with no one. But I’m not sure what healthy way there is to air those out without making it seem like I’m constantly whining. Put on a mask that everything is happy in the hope that they won’t see through that and discover how pathetic I really am.
I work out at gyms so I can have exercise in a safe manner, and without the hot weather making everything sticky even for minor movements (or no movements). I like taking walks but the weather and the pedestrian hell traffic (that the government has no will to fix) makes this unpalatable. But I’m not interested in BJJ at all and I don’t think it will fix anything for me.
TL, read what I just said about getting sucked into doom-loop thoughts. It’s not about “bottling it up”, but moving your focus onto more productive trains of thought. Whatever pain you need to deal with, you will not be able to deal with it while you are depressed. Fix the very practical problems in your life that have caused your depression. Then later - much later - you can bring out all those skeletons from the cupboard, dust them off, and see if they’re worth hanging onto.
For now, put them aside.
And try doing things you don’t want to do, like BJJ - which I think is an excellent suggestion, for all kinds of reasons. Sitting around playing computer games is an absolutely terrible idea - a martial-arts class will get you doing something physical, it’ll get you interacting with people (without any pressure to perform socially), and it’ll get you learning a new skill. All of these are going to have a positive impact on your mood.