General Stories

Neetdom Purgetory and How I Escaped It

Neetdom (The state of being not employed or in education or training) can be one of two things: Absolute freedom, or psychological torture. There’s nothing wrong with taking off time to keep your mind off hard work (implying you done any work before becoming a neet in some cases) for it’s a great way to recharge your stamina or focus on your personal hobbies whatever they may be. On the other hand, there are major drawbacks to living the neet lifestyle that will severely damage you in the long run the longer you stay in the state of neetdom. I had some experience being a neet after being unable to continue my education post high school graduation. At the time, I thought that life was pretty much over for me. I had no reason to go out and interact or contribute anything to society. In my thought process, it was the world’s fault that I wasn’t able to make it academically or socially. I went into hiding within my own home. The home of which my parents owned even after they divorced. For the next four or so years, I did all I could to not come out from my room for anything other than bathroom breaks, food, or the occasional package I would order online. I cut off contacts with all of my relatives other than my mom. I did not use any social media. I’d even went as far as to make no attempt to communicate with people online. In other words, I put myself into solidarity confinement for the crime of being socially inept and academically a failure.

The first year was kind of relaxing, I won’t deny that. I had all the time in the world to play pretty much any game I wanted, watch any show I wanted, and post on any board I wanted. When you have an entire day open to yourself, you’ll find all sorts of stuff to keep yourself entertained at first. Sure you could try learning a skill if you had any work ethic but I didn’t have any ethics. Pleasure was the main priority over anything else. While I was composing music to some extent at the time, It wasn’t to the extent and dedication that I had for it now. Why compose when I can play my favorite games instead? When it came to food, I didn’t really have that many options other than pizza delivery and whatever happened to be stored in the kitchen. I had these savings that I kept around since my high school and college years which were mostly used for food delivery or the occasional game that might go on sale on steam, usually anything under $10 was my limit since I had no income. The only exercise I ever got was getting up from my chair to go take a piss/shit, grab some food, yell at my mom, knock out on the bed, or get the mail outside for my brief exposure to sunlight. Suffice to say, my health was probably on the decline by the end of the year and would only get worse as I continued my years of neetdom. I also had a severe masturbation addiction to the point where I couldn’t go on without jacking off more than 3-5 times a day. For the time, I thought I had it made but in hindsight, it really was one of the worst state of being anyone could ever endure. And I would begin to slowly realize that as I spent more time in neetdom.

Suddenly, you start to realize a problem. All of these games you considered to be your favorites are starting to become really stale. No matter what you do, You can’t get anything out of playing these games anymore. It starts to feel like a chore just to launch the Steam launcher, boot up your game, and join the same servers doing almost the same thing you did as yesterday. You aren’t being challenged, there is no gratification for making it top of the scoreboard, and slowly you begin to realize how much time you have just wasted on one stupid game. You try to pick up another game to see if you get a different experience but you soon realize that even those games don’t excite you as much as any other vidya game would in your own personal history. You decide maybe it’s time to give gaming a break and so you go to your personal storage device and look up something to watch in the meantime. Your hard drive is packed with all sorts of content, most of which you won’t even bother watching anytime soon if at all. “Why do you have this stuff?”; It’s a phrase I keep telling myself as I look for something to watch from my video files. Perhaps I should obtain more shows and movies on those private trackers. Maybe I’ll find a show I’ll actually like this time and won’t be a drag like the last one. And in those cases when you don’t find anything, you resort to masturbation not because you feel aroused but because you are bored out of your mind with nothing else to do in the hopes that climaxing will give you that few seconds of satisfaction before you start to feel numb again. Afterwards, you are left with no choice but to just play whatever game you have any slight leanings towards and just play until you get tired to the point of exhaustion. This cycle would repeat itself over and over for myself. I would had lost track of time if I haven't been keeping an eye on stuff going on in the real world through boards like /pol/. Deep inside, everyone wanted stuff to happen, let it be plague, war, riots, or whatever. Eventually, stuff like that would break into the news and everyone on /pol/ would be on the edge, "Alright!" "IT'S HAPPENING BOYS", "CIVILIZATION WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN". I think for those of us in a neet situtaion, we just wanted society to collapse just as an excuse to break out of our isolation from the outside world. It was all wishful thinking.

There’s another stage of neetdom that eventually you start to come in contact with after dealing with the same cycle of boredom, dissatisfaction, and loneliness for so long. Depression. At this stage, I was beginning to doubt a lot of things. I start to reflect a lot on my failures in the past. The future isn’t going to get any better by living like this. Nobody is going to save me. Not even my own mom whom at this point is getting tired of me being completely useless. As much as it annoys me, she is right for once in that statement. I was completely useless. I didn’t achieve anything by being stuck in the room. There was no point to playing any of these videos games, watching these shows, or fapping if it’s not going to change anything for the next the day or the day after that. Somedays, I wouldn’t even bother doing anything other than eating and sleeping. I had no motivation to do anything. I would move even less than I did during my first few years of neetdom. I had gained a lot of weight which made me feel sloggy and even more disdain for my own appearance whenever I would see myself in the bathroom mirror. What a pathetic creature I was. Why even go on like this. The way I saw it, there were two options to change this, die doing nothing, or die doing something.

For a very long time, I have been unable to get my driver’s license. Perhaps because I was afraid of driving ever since I was in high school. If I were to try to get myself as far away from my neet prison, I would first need to get a car and learn to drive. I was able to earn enough money to buy a crappy beat up Honda Civic after selling off some of my personal belongings. This was kind of a pact I made as a way to indicate to myself there’s no going back from this. Suffice to say, I wasn’t a good driver by any means, and it took two driving exams before I was finally able to pass my driving test. From then, I finally had the freedom to drive wherever I wanted provided I had money for gas. A minor victory but still an important step none the less.

Finding a job wasn’t easy back then, and it’s still isn’t any easier even now. This was during the post recession economy and nobody was hiring wherever you went. Even the most mundane and bottom of the barrel jobs required some sort of experience, skills, or even degrees just to qualify for an interview. I applied everywhere I could and had to wait months if not years for any sort of reply. The demoralization of having to look for jobs when none were available can be overbearing sometimes. You wonder how so many people can even have jobs in the first place. Suffice to say, it took a very long while before I was able to get my second job that I worked in (prior to that, I did work part time my university admissions so it’s not like I didn’t have any experience in anything but the gap between the time I used to work to where I was while on a job hunt was so wide, there might as well be nothing to show for it). I would eventually find a temporary job as a night guard for a security company. It was something that didn’t really need any skills to do properly other than make reports on suspicious activity. While it’s not the STEM job that I was trying to obtain while going to college, it’s at least something that will provide me passive income. In retrospect, it’s not my favorite job out of all the jobs I’ve done in my life. The work shifts were late at night up into the morning, the work itself wasn’t very engaging since nothing ever happened during these shifts. Pay in general was not the best either. Nevertheless, I did make a mediocre income that I was happy with before I could quit my job to find another job that was more engaging. I still move from job to job till this day but I’ve got better at applying for them so I am not worried about being unemployable anymore.

And ever since then, I had no longer fallen back into the neetdom phase ever again. I begin to self improve in many ways including improving my health and losing enough weight to become skinny again. I now try to work out in order to gain some strength. I have a renewed interest in traditionalism and preparing for the worst. The latter proved to be an extremely useful skill set last year in preparing for all the chaos that happened. While socially, I am only slightly less anxious when it comes to speaking to people, I still don’t have the connections needed to have a healthy social life but I wouldn’t say the loneliness is as destructive as it was back when I didn’t do anything. I may not be overly optimistic about the future as a whole (not just for me but for my country as well), I do feel like I am not unable to do something to mitigate the stress of it all and still move forward. You have to always be doing something that’s going to leave improvement for more the next time. I don’t play video games that much as I use to if not at all since I find more pleasure in doing things that actually have some sort of benefit. Even composing music or writing blogs on this webpage helps me in many ways than some might initially think. It’s for that reason that I can’t officially endorse the neet lifestyle for anyone. It’s dangerous to your mental and physical health and the longer you do it, the more you’ll struggle later on. I understand that society isn’t as great as it’s made out to be by normalfags but you have to do something that isn’t completely useless so that you can maybe just maybe have a chance at succeeding in life. There is no guarantee that what I am doing will eventually bring me to happiness in the future but at the very least, I like to think that being productive will eventually reward me with something down the line. Maybe it won’t be a girlfriend, or a nice place to live, or even wealth beyond measure, but it’ll be better than nothing.