I suppose there have been some positives to come out of it, like my brother and I looking at a house now instead of renting. We probably could still continue renting, but feels like we've outgrown that stage. (Mostly due to the costs being so high and having more stuff) Just the feeling of selfishness in society has grown, with people thinking for themselves and no one else. Whether it's commuting to work, trying to get through the grocery store, or going to a restaurant, it's always the "me first! me first!" mentality.
It certainly hasn't helped while at work, where just about everyone in any department dumps something on me and expects me to clean up a mess that should not have been made in the first place. Communication is terrible between co-workers and it feels that way outside of work too. Most of my friends have gotten married, a house, kids, or in a relationship, etc, so we haven't really connected in a while with life getting in the way. A few I still try to spend time with, but we can hardly get our schedules to align.
My brother has probably been the one person really keeping me going throughout all these years. It feels a bit clingy and like I'm nothing but a dependent on him, but he's brought me out of my darkest times. He pushes me to go out and experience things as well as turning things around from my mostly pessimistic mindset.
I do find GTP to be one of the places I enjoy coming to, to post and discuss things like hobbies, opinions, and what not. Acquaintances and friends on social media platforms have been good to me for the most part, but of course there are the ones who don't say a thing, other than bringing it up elsewhere and making things worse. I recently had a mental break(down) at work and without thinking said some not so kind things about my work without blocking co-workers, who went and told the managers. Getting myself in more trouble and making things worse, so I know I should probably stay off that and not let co-workers see what I say. Been wanting to leave this job ever since I started 4+ years ago, but I don't know where to go from there without falling back into the same cycle. I keep hearing "Why don't you just go back to school? It's not that hard, doesn't take long, and helps a bunch!" But something keeps holding me back from doing it and I only hate myself more thinking about it.
We're at slightly different stages of life, but I can relate to your last point about school. I never had any idea what I wanted to do for a living, and I largely still don't, but because of that, going to school felt like such a pointless endeavor because I didn't even know what I wanted out of it. I've oscillated between going to school and working part-time, or not going to school and working full-time several times now. After the spring semester in 2020, I waited things out until the following spring in order to avoid taking online classes, but that was the period of time in which I became disillusioned with work. I learned that it wasn't worth the trouble to go out of your way for a job. At my work, you able to work at different locations, so I was able to get a change of scenery and distance myself from the problems. When I bottomed out at work, the prospect of going back to school suddenly became much more appealing, if only because it
wasn't work. I returned to school the following spring, and even though I was still chipping away at classes for something I didn't care about, I appreciated the change of pace from solely working all the time. However, since I still didn't feel like I was working towards a clear goal, I took another hiatus until last fall when I decided I wanted to study psychology, and completed the remainder of my classes. I still don't know what I want to do for a living, but I don't worry about that so much now that I've finally chosen something to study that interests me.
I'm still at the same job that I described before. In fact, this summer I returned to the location that took so much of a toll on me before, but I'm in a different headspace now than I was then. In my personal life, I've been lucky enough to have been surrounded by good people in my friends and family, but because of that, I had no experience in enforcing boundaries. In January I will have been at my job for 5 years, the longest I've stayed at a job, but it's been a constant struggle of enforcing boundaries and standing my ground. I'm not advocating for selfishness, and I'm not suggesting that you slack either, but I do a good enough job that when coworkers approach me with unreasonable demands, or just asking me to flat-out do the work for them, I have no qualms about politely but firmly letting them know when they've crossed the line and when they need to finish what they started. My workplace experiences are colored by the fact that my coworkers are my peers - other young, college-aged men, which means most of my coworkers are really flaky and low on conscientiousness. When I'm at work, I try my best to stay in a good headspace (which is still often unsuccessful), but my disposition leads people to think that I'll acquiesce to whatever unreasonable proposition they're pushing.
In summary, I hope you'll find my ramblings helpful, because I've always enjoyed your posts. The main idea of my reply is to illustrate that it's taken time for me to learn how to balance work and school, but along the way, I learned to appreciate both for what they are,
and what they aren't. At my job, there's coworkers who don't care enough, and coworkers who care too much. The coworkers who care too much end up getting burnt out and jaded. It happened to me, and I was really down about it for a while. As time passed, I reoriented my views on work and school. In respect to work, I realized that all I can do is do a good job, but I can't
really exert meaningful control over anything outside myself. It seems so obvious when typed out, but it's been so liberating for me. Nothing has really changed at work; there's still problems all the time and a good majority of my coworkers are incompetent. Only now, it doesn't feel like such a big deal anymore. My expectations are always zero. When things get screwed up, I'm never surprised anymore. I just do my job, and at the end of the day I don't take it home with me because I've done everything I can do, so there's nothing that I should worry about.
