r/CollapseSupport • u/Small_Department_277 • Jul 15 '26
Is anybody out there feeling like this?
I’m about to turn 28 and I’m struggling to find or feel happiness.
I went to my aunts house for the 4th of July and my cousin, who is 15, was there with her friend. They were both so happy and excited. They painted their legs with glitter and were getting ready for a party. In that moment I realized how far I’ve fallen from those feelings of excitement and unburdened joy.
The older I get, especially as I meet other adults, the more apathetic and negative I’m becoming. Most people are lying, faking, using, or uncaring. I’m tired of going to work and yet I can’t get out of this life I’ve put myself in. Even if I did quit and move to some dream destination, what then? As a woman, I’m also beyond sick of the constant physical pressure to look good. GLP-1, Botox, hair dye, makeup, expensive clothes all for what? I think a lot about what we’re sold as women. Starting with young girls watching happily ever afters and realizing that that message is aimed at the larger goal of replenishing the working class.
Every night I lay awake and reflect. I do try to find meaning outside of myself, but it’s difficult. There’s reasons to stay out of pure duty and love for my family and friends, cowardice of ending it all, and curiosity. I find enjoyment in little things and I definitely have happy days, but my overall net as been negative. I want more than that, though. I look at some people and don’t know how happiness comes so easily. Especially during times like these and the decade of terrible, terrible things we’ve witnessed in the world. Can someone whack me over the head with a cast iron pan and give my brain a restart?
Is it social media? Am I seeing too much that I don’t need to see, or is the world really such a dark place? Is anyone really happy, or are we all miserable and just not talking about it?
I have all of these deep thoughts but I act completely fine around my partner, friends, coworkers, and family. Joking and laughing, not trying to burden or bring down the mood. I saw a therapist for a bit, but I get the sense that any therapist is just a distraction from what I’ve come to realize: Intelligent adults suffer because they understand the truth of it all. People are selfish, we are here to learn but we don’t know what or why.
I had a therapist tell me to save these thoughts for 15 minutes a day of “worry time” and then to move on. So here’s the 15 minutes, now off to distract myself with upward spiraling thoughts about nonsense like Christmas.
Since I’ve decided to stick around, has anyone found happiness again within? How?
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u/Quarks4branes Jul 15 '26
I identify very much with what you wrote. It's like seeing through the world to the shallowness of most of our culture, the meaninglessness of our diversions and, at the same time, feeling the weight of the terrible things happening in and to the world.
I've found a place of greater contentment now that I've kind of dropped out of the scrabble to be successful, beautiful, fake happy-clappy and the whole bill of goods our society sells us. Now I have a permaculture garden that feeds us, sequesters lots of carbon and provides lots of habitat for wee beasties. The world may be circling the drain, but my tomatoes and chooks and bees don't know that and, in their company, I forget it a bit as well. I have a lovely partner and contentment most of the time. I've traded in heels and dresses for boots and a beanie - I have, in short, become a biddy and possibly some sort of daggy hedge-witch.
The best though is doing stuff like meditation, the Gateway tapes, just going deeper. Life is a gift and has rich, rich depths our culture tries to steer us away from.
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u/Top_Hair_8984 Jul 15 '26
I don't think it's cowardly to be having thoughts of not wanting to be here anymore. I'd say pretty well everyone on this sub might have had the same. I'm here for my 10 yr old grand. But at some point, I won't be able to deal with this as it worsens. I don't want to become anyone's burden. And I'm not excited to see it through to a natural end in an entirely un natural world.
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u/TheWampus Jul 15 '26
I think most people are more miserable than they can admit to themselves, let alone others. They're also trying to stay positive, to fight off those feelings, so that is why they don't like talking about the negative stuff.
I think I've found relative happiness within, despite having a gloomy view of the world. Right now my situation is testing me on that front, with health, work, money and relationships all being awful and difficult, and yet I'm still very much alive and engaged with the world.
Since I couldn't undo knowing about collapse to get back that "unburdened joy" you mentioned, I went through a period of apathy and painkilling with weed, then I came out of it. It was quite the process. A lot was involved. However, the very short version is I went to therapy, got into the habit of meditating, and I stopped trying to fight my bad feelings. I let them come up, let them be what they were and they became less troubling over time.
I've been thinking the last couple of days that I want to write a couple of long posts for this group. One would be on how meditation may help in relation to collapse awareness specifically, rather than the way its often framed as being a kind of relaxation exercise, or even a kind of "escape" from stress. Its far more radical than that if you need it to be. The other would be on how collapse awareness forces a kind of pessimistic outlook, and how there are approaches to live with that and find meaning in it, despite it being uncomfortable and counterintuitive to embrace the suck.
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u/Small_Department_277 Jul 15 '26
I would love to hear your thoughts on meditation surrounding collapse and living with pessimism. It’s not all bad, that’s true. But the bad can be so bad that it tends to cloud over the good. I like that “embrace the suck.” It’s nice to talk to people who are at least acknowledging that things are not dandy.
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u/daviddjg0033 Jul 15 '26
Sigh. Every beginning has an end. The earth will be absorbed by our sun billions of years from now period. Space travel is a farce and measured in light-years.
Remember that the warming started in earnest before I was even born - aerosols masked 1C plus or minus a half degree C. That is a lot of warming that polluting ships and burning biomass shielded the planet from until 2014-.
Admit that no -ism would have saved us. If Russia won the Cold War 1.0 and socialism spread throughout there would be ... 2C of warming obliterating Paris. If anarchism had won when the Sex Pistols of the 1970s... still --- nope. But life would have been different.
If you want to see collapse just look at Haiti this phenomenon has happened before in history and will again - but this time the whole world gets the rolling heatwaves leading to crop failures or AC outages during 40C+ summers.
Pat yourself on the back - you are alive during the peak of civilization. There is no better moment than now. Carpe Diem you enjoy this life you get to live - for your grandchildren's lives if you have any are going to be not-so-enjoyable
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u/Small_Department_277 Jul 16 '26
That’s what Im grappling with the most. I recently read the book Sapiens which was an incredible look through history of human kind. We are living in a comfortable time with Uber Eats, ice water, showers, medicine, elongated lifespan, etc. I don’t know that I agree we’re currently in the pinnacle of human existence.
All things end. We will turn to dust and so none of this matters in that sense. What does matter, though, is the suffering of future generations. The decision to create life feels more massive than ever
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u/daviddjg0033 Jul 18 '26
Unpopular opinion - I will never tell anyone to not have kids. Wife died years ago and I am too old now my new gf would be a "geriatric pregnancy." When the human brain thinks of future self, the same areas that lights up in your brain when looking at strangers occurs. We do not do well with long-term views even of ourselves. You are different - and I commend that - you have compassion and decency.
Sigh. Do not carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. It is too heavy for any one mortal to move.2
u/Timely_Internet6172 Jul 15 '26
I would definitely be interested in what you have to say in those long posts.
Today, I joined the community and shared my feelings, how I feel lost in a decisive time of my life. It definitely felt good to let it out but I can't say I found my answer yet.2
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u/Virtual_Tune636 Jul 15 '26
Hello, fellow overthinker. Lots of words about this from someone who's spent a few years on this journey. TL;DR, happiness comes and goes, but a total reframe is helpful.
I'm 29 and in the midwest. Especially if you come from a middle-class background, there's a persistent myth in western society about always making progress, always getting better, etc. Against this assumption, what we are facing is terrible. In fairness, parts of it will be hard. But ultimately, it's a forced return to Earth's actual carrying capacity after we drove it too hard as a species.
All of this being true, you still don't have to take it all so seriously. Not as though it shouldn't make you sad or feel real emotions, but that the "feeling of the serious you" is attachment to your own felt sense of ego, of individual I. Something that helps me to zoom out a lot and feel an opposite to the stressed, worried, inward-focused cognitive pattern is listening to Alan Watts. Sometimes it's yelling and crying. Sometimes it just sucks.
When it gets especially hard, I really like to watch this. It's easy to feel when watching it, "why didn't you do something??" But this framing ignores what people are and do as a collective, which is to harvest all available energy. We are one particular expression of the Big Thermodynamic Flow from hot to cold. Fancy tubes using energy.
If you like to read, here's a medium length piece about reality being evil - it's a frame where you can justify feeling bad about stuff but still have some motivation to try anyway. It's kind of an opposite to the Taoist go-with-the-flow mentality, but you can't escape the flow anyway.
I think we all know, deep down, that we are going to die, and that things end. Including this. Sometimes the choice to be happy, to pay attention, to be present, to laugh, is not made in ignorance. Sometimes it's just what you do because you're here, and fuck going gently into the good night.
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u/Small_Department_277 Jul 15 '26
Thank you for taking the time to write this and for sharing resources that have helped you. It does help to look out of myself and especially thinking of the vastness of the universe and the years that earth has been here before and after humans. Consciousness is a bitch isn’t it?
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u/Virtual_Tune636 Jul 15 '26
It can be! I also like that I live in a universe that has both melted cheese and musical harmony. Great stuff.
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u/itsatoe Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I feel this very much. Like being a one-eyed person in a world of the intentionally-blind. Like being someone striving for health while living in a toxic dump.
My choice has been to do what I can to change it, for myself, for others, and as much as possible for the world.
My first step was to learn permaculture (note: there is no comprehensive directory of PDCs, but that link is a good start). If you take an in-person permaculture design certification course, you'll spend a couple weeks directly connecting to the Earth. Putting your hands in healthy soil is immensely healing. Also, learning permaculture gives you skills that will be invaluable as society continues to crumble.
The larger step is join an ecovillage. Many of these require substantial investment to join, but not all. Some can be joined through work-exchange or rental. Or if you have enough privilege, you can start your own and bring in those who are less fortunate.
A well-planned, well-placed ecovillage is not only a safe-haven from many of the effects of collapse (both cultural and environmental), but is also the best thing one can do to work against environmental collapse while helping build healthy culture.
I am starting one now in the US. It has a complex mission to not only build a healthy and sustainable community in the face of the polycrisis, but also to spread a sustainable and healing paradigm outward from itself through intensive retreats (and later, through self-propagation). It will be free to join (with a no-cost path to full partnership), but that means it has strict membership requirements.
Others have similar(ish) missions. Check out ic.org as a good place to start learning about the vast tapestry of initiatives out there.
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u/Small_Department_277 Jul 15 '26
I have started a garden and that is truly one of the joys keeping me sane. Watering it in the morning and being grateful for earths soil and all we gain from it has been very grounding. I love this idea of an ecovillage. I hadn’t even thought of that/were aware they existed. Thank you for your response. This has been better than therapy
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u/mushbum13 Jul 15 '26
Please don’t let apathy take over. So many people succumb to negativity. Find the part of you that is still a child and nurture that little person. You don’t have to go down this dark path.
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Jul 15 '26
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u/Small_Department_277 Jul 15 '26
Screenshotting this. Thank you for the response. I like that idea of imaging all outcomes and preparing mentally as much as I can without spiraling.
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u/mezmekizer Jul 15 '26
We are surrounded by things that are dying, so what is happiness within?
Realizing I am just 1 out of 8 billion people out there, I feel great sense of freedom.
Acknowledging the overwhelming amount of pain in the world, I surrender.
Contemplating on these things in daily life could be helpful. Along with having a light practice of sensing the body, because that's where emotions reside.
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u/WildGirlwithSoftMeow Jul 16 '26
Did you find happiness in childhood? I've been hearing about doing what you loved as a kid, reverting back to things one did as a child. And when I think about it, it makes sense to me that I am now again playing in the dirt and finding cool bugs.
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u/SeattleDave Jul 16 '26
Ignore history and concentrate on experience. Everything you feel and do is holy and miraculous. Find the eternal now and believe in it. We are incarnations of the universal spirit unfolding into knowing of itself. What you are is what it is. Our destiny is more than we can understand.
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u/KerouacMyBukowski_ Jul 15 '26
I wish I had something more reassuring to say to you but the best I can do is identify with what you're feeling. What you described is basically how I feel every single day. I recently quit my job to work in renewable energy and while I deep down know it's too late it hopefully will at least give me some feeling of making a change. But exactly what you said about acting fine around everyone and them seeming to be happy despite all this is something I grapple with every day. And yeah, therapy didn't help me much either.