Honestly, can relate! Had a month-long period when all I craved were carrot and white onion salads with a tiny pinch of salt, a load of ground black pepper, and drowned in vinegar. Used to chop the carrots down into tiny strips.

Mustard bread. I'm dead serious.

Edit to clarify: just a slice of bread with a heap of mustard rushedly spread on it. I either go for honey mustard if I'm looking for a bit of pep, or whole grain Dijon for savouring.

Oh, YEAAH, DADDY, SHOVE THAT CAMARADERIE RIGHT UP MY ASS AND SLAP MY CHEEKS!

As a non-American, this. And I honestly don't understand why so many people in our neck of the woods aren't more concerned about this. You guys are such a heavy hitter from a socio-economical standpoint, that anything which goes down in your country will inevitably affect everyone else.

... and a mop!

That sounds incredibly stressful, and I'm truly sorry you find yourself in this situation... But I honestly wouldn't stress so much about the degree. I don't know the exact hiring standards 'round your parts, but mine has entered the discussion precisely zero times in 12 years of working. I've just quit a QA Engineer position where I was considered Senior (for some reason...) and all I have under my belt is a Bachelor's in Theatre Acting.

To be fair, I literally started from the bottom, my first job paid the bare minimum and I languished there for about 4 years (big corpo, one of a hundred billion nameless faces, that kind of deal) before they pushed me to PM basically because they had nobody else with that amount of time spent on the procedures. Got lucky because that's where the Liberal Arts background actually came in handy, helps with people stuff. And I just launched afterwards through start-ups (although I really don't recommend them nowadays, VERY volatile), where they needed skill over paperwork.

Point is, skill always shines through eventually. Just make sure you keep yourself sane until you get there!

I wouldn't beat myself up about not finding myself, either. And, honestly, I don't think anyone ever will, because we're so dynamic in terms of psychology, that by the time you find something which'd work with you as you are now, you'll have been a thousand different "you"s and it will be obsolete. I try to apply the engineer's credo: "good enough is good enough," whatever doesn't piss me off to the point of going apeshit is a-ok in my book! Edit to add: I also believe the journey's more important.

As a (veeery sloowly) recovering stress addict, I can guarantee that the two are directly linked, the body does, indeed, keep the score. Just imagine the kind of damage done by the kind of existential anxiety you're describing... I'll not insult you by assuming I know exactly what you're going through, but I do understand what you mean. Think it's affecting all of us in one way or another, it's been feeling like the rumble before the wall of snow for a couple of years now...

It's my absolute pleasure, and I hope it helped at least with letting you know you're not alone out there. Just hunker down as best you can and take care of your soul. Not saying this with any connotation, protect that spark which is You at any cost, and spoil it like you would your own child.

Well, actually... !=))))

The funniest bit was that the truck stop was literally in the middle of nowhere and there were thickets right next to the restroom...

Technically true if the other objects are part of the payload, it's only partially full of drugs!

I'd say anything creative, something which pushes the mind to focus on generating new ideas instead of just running through the same old ones - this worked for me, at least, as rumination and catastrophising have been stapled to my noggin my entire life.

To be more specific, painting, building stuff with Legos, drawing, writing poetry, composing songs, whittling, woodworking, stuff like that.

Another important aspect (at least from personal experience, ymmv) is keeping the hobby a hobby - what I mean by this is not falling into the trap of perfectionism or productivity with it, keeping it light and fun. I now strongly believe that the brain needs something "inconsequential" on which to chew if only to remind it that not every stimulus it receives is do-or-die.

I am 100% certain I've seen this guy in a truck stop's restroom somewhere in Bulgaria! He sold me two squares of TP, it was one of those pay-to-pee things and the TP was ""complimentary.""

Sounds like a perfectly natural self-preservation reaction to increasingly hostile and oppressive working conditions (not saying all jobs, just most jobs). Why would anyone want a career when most people with careers only complain (and rightfully so) about burnout, depression, and an overall loss of that particular spark of life which pushes us forward.

Hell, just last month we've had a case where a 26-year-old woman committed you-know-what within 24 hours of getting a performance review at work, in which management complained that her already burgeoning workload wasn't burgeoning enough...

Old fart unrequested advice time: delay it as much as you practically can, saying this as a 30-something who wishes he'd taken a couple of years off after high-school to figure stuff out. If you can't find something which'll spark joy in your heart, then try to find something which won't completely ruin it, at least - like elevator music, something you can ignore. And in the meantime, lean into your passions.

And, most importantly, don't get stuck in thinking about productivity. Productivity is nothing but a societal construct meant to make us hate ourselves if we're not constantly working. But biology doesn't function like that, and it is never idle. Even when doing "nothing," your body is churning away at perpetuating your existence, which, if you ask me, is the hardest job of them all nowadays...

Great, there go another 60 hours in SotFS... THAAANKS!!!

Hope you enjoy, Guts is part of Haunted, the one which caused the furor!

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted is the first thing which popped into my head.

It's a 'diegetic' anthology, the context is reminiscent of Sartre's No Exit in many ways, but taken to Palahniuk's particular style of extreme.

There's one short story in it which caused furor back in the day, but I honestly found the meta-context to be even more philosophically gruesome.

Edit: may be biased, I got the book as a gift from a girl I used to like a lot, but she... well, let's just say she was living that book at the time.

Probably just a misfire...

Yeah... it's unfortunate that such a vital subject serves to amplify the rifts between people...

On one hand, I can sort of understand, it really isn't pleasant to assimilate the thought that society and the planet as we've known them are on an aggressive trajectory toward the garbage dump. Not hard to understand the pull toward denial, especially with so many things going wrong on so many different levels.

On the other hand it's immensely frustrating to see the planet being steadily transformed into a trash bin, getting ruined for pretty much all lifeforms which now inhabit it, and a lot of people choosing to ignore or even outright deny what's easily noticeable all around us...

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect this'll keep happening for a while, human beings have historically been primarily reactive beings. I fear that things will have to get a lot worse before it starts being a generally accepted fact.

All we can do is "keep the faith" so to speak, keep spreading the obvious truth, and try to reach as many people as would be open to hearing us out. One can only deny reality for so long before reality turns around and applies a solid slap in the face. Here's hoping we won't need a gut-punch...

Not again...

Daily. Sometimes twice.

The most satisfying part is seeing that your insistence is slowly but surely corrupting them toward the path of light!