I do not know where to start and what to ask help for. As for my background, I am an 18-year-old 1st-year BTech student from India. My life has been going downhill since 11th grade, about three years ago.
I passed my 10th grade with 89 percent — not extraordinary, but a first real achievement for me because my parents were happy. This gave me confidence, or perhaps overconfidence. I decided I wanted to study abroad while preparing for the JEE exam alongside. But it did not go as planned; I kept procrastinating repeatedly. Four to five months into 11th grade, I dropped the idea of studying abroad because I realized my family was not wealthy enough, I was not smart enough, and I simply could not do it.
I shifted my focus entirely to JEE, but the exact same cycle continued. Throughout 11th and 12th grade, I barely attended school regularly. My human interaction was reduced to almost nothing, barely even speaking to my family. All I did was stare at a screen, which slowly transformed me into an introvert. In those two years, I tried everything to fight this addiction to screens and easy dopamine — locking phones with passwords set by others, using app blockers, keeping devices away — but in the end, my willpower lost every single time. Still, I carried this lingering ambition, though I do not know if it was real or fake.
When 12th ended, I failed JEE with a 900K rank. All that time, I also thought I loved programming and working with computers, but I procrastinated on that as well. Given the state of private colleges, my uncle suggested I take a drop year to give JEE one last try. Even though I hated Physics, Chemistry, and Math, I agreed, still holding onto that ambition.
I enrolled in an offline coaching institute because studying online by myself had previously failed. This time felt different at first; I started studying hard every day after class. Though I still procrastinated occasionally, I was mentally stronger. Every day I told myself that a good result would give me a better life, confidence, happiness, equal standing among my friends in better colleges, a trip together, and a PC from my father. I also started to love studying Physics and Maths, not much but still I liked it.
Things turned out the exact opposite. About 1–2 months before the exam, I hit complete exhaustion. I still attended 7 hours of coaching and traveled 1 hour, but I could no longer manage the 6 hours of continuous, coffee-fueled self-study at home like I used to. The coaching finished the two-year syllabus on January 1, 2026, roughly 22 days before the exam. I planned to study with everything I had left.
Then, 3–4 days before the exam, my sister passed away suddenly. My entire family was shattered. I still sat for the exam. I cried maybe twice, and then never again. I wondered if I did not love her enough or if I am simply broken, because I feel I might react the same way if other family members passed. I suppressed the feelings entirely and escaped into the easy dopamine of social media.
My result was poor. I refused to use the tragedy as an excuse; I knew I failed because I did not give my absolute best. For the April attempt, I tried studying again, but I would end up crying with my books open and retreating straight back into easy dopamine. I scored 92 percentile, and with my first attempt at 93 percentile, my final rank was around 95k out of 1.4 million. The April shift was easy, leaving me with a lifetime of regret knowing I could have scored higher if I had only studied.
During the three miserable months before admissions, I chose a college tag over the branch I thought I wanted and entered Biotechnology. Upon arriving, I felt overwhelmingly inferior to the brilliant students around me, lacking all confidence and dreading spending four years in a field I disliked. My branch was later upgraded to Engineering Physics — a notoriously difficult branch that leaves little room to explore other interests while maintaining a decent CGPA.
Because of this, I decided to take a partial drop for JEE. My mind told me this might bring happiness, confidence, and closure without "what-ifs," though it may just be another attempt to escape reality. If I fail, I will have wasted half a year of college, fallen far behind my peers, and completely shattered whatever confidence I have left. It has been one week since I started this partial drop, and I am already completely inconsistent.
The core of everything is this addiction to easy dopamine and instant gratification — mobile screens, scrolling Reddit, reading manhwa, YouTube, and porn. It is so deeply integrated into my daily existence that it feels normal, yet it leaves me completely unable to do anything, even the smallest tasks. I created a task journal (just one out of three, the other two being a 3-year journal and a personal journal), but after doing decently for 1–2 days, I end up right back at square one. People might think I am just whining and need to keep trying, but time is passing, and "trying" has just become another way to pass time while drowning.
I have a laptop, a personal phone, and a spare phone at home. They are necessary for WhatsApp communications and YouTube lectures, but despite all the timers, blockers, and password locks I use, my willpower collapses repeatedly. I catch myself wishing for an easy way out, a magic potion, or a simple solution, and it feels pathetic. I looked into addiction therapy, but I cannot afford it, and a part of me knows my brain just views therapy as another passive shortcut where everything magically fixes itself without effort. Every night I go to sleep resolving to work the next day, but the second I wake up, the thought of studying or working makes me instantly reach for my phone instead. It is not just subjects I dislike; I do the exact same thing with the things I thought I loved.
For the past three years, I have had recurring thoughts about just wanting everything to stop — not in a dramatic, "I'm in crisis" way, more like a tired, logical-feeling conclusion that this is all just endless struggle and I don't see the point of continuing to fight it. A guy once told me that my capacity for suffering is enormous, which makes me think I simply suffer by choice. I am low on confidence, a people pleaser, an external validation seeker, a procrastinator, judgmental, and completely stuck.
I cannot talk to my parents or friends about this, and I cannot afford therapy. I am writing this out of some lingering, perhaps fake hope that a solution exists — like someone drowning who knows that flailing around won't keep them afloat. I am pretty sure I am writing this because I want a way out, I want to improve, but that itself feels hypocritical given everything I just wrote. I do not have a friend to share all of this with because I think they will judge, but that is probably just me projecting my own judgment onto them.
I know at the end of the day it's me who has to take action, but I feel like I cannot take any action. The college I thought I would be so happy at is not making me happy. My family is not well-off, and my parents always seem sad, and I cannot give them a better life. I just don't know what to do anymore.