Hello, my name is David Russell, and I am depressed.
I am a 25 year old, white, male, college-educated, American. I have a wife who loves me more than anything in the world. I have a family that cares about me. I have no debt from school or car payments or anything. The reason I have no debt is because my mother has enough money that she paid for my college and my car outright.
I have more advantages than anyone could ever need, and a good deal more than most people get.
I am currently unemployed. I hate this. I have never had any form of actual job in a career sense of the word. What I have had is a string of shitty high-schooler quality jobs that I hated every second, of every minute, of every hour I spent at any of them. I hated all of these jobs, and I hate not having a job. For all I know, I would hate having a career-type job too.
I am smart, not genius smart, but probably more intelligent than the person reading this from a purely statistical standpoint. Smart enough to sit in classrooms and daydream and still pass high school and college. Could I have worked hard and gotten perfect grades? Yes. But I always felt quite certain that nobody actually gave a shit about grades, just the piece of paper you get that says "Blah Blah College". In my personal experience, as well as what I absorb or gather from others, this assumption remains true.
I have a bachelors degree I did almost nothing to earn. There were times when I cared about it, was interested by it, and even really worked hard. However ultimately what I have is a very expensive piece of paper and very little knowledge, if any at all, that I couldn't have gathered on my own.
There is no message here, there is no moral, and no lesson. This is just a part of my story. I have no reason to believe anyone wants to hear it, and I am not interested in making them change their minds if they don't. Do I want people to like me? Sure. But I have always had this problem with pandering to what other people expect.
I can't fake it in job interviews for long enough to get hired. Even while I half-heartedly answer questions the way they are obviously supposed to be answered I hate myself for it. I wish more than anything I had the audacity to say something like: "No, I don't actually give a shit about business-to-business marketing, my education just came to a point where I had to pick something to focus into and I landed on this. I don't care about your company at all, I doubt you (the interviewer) even care about it, you just care about money, and I need some of that too, I just can't make myself dance for you to get it." But I never say that, I just become increasingly anxious and timid until I am paralyzed by it. During some interviews I have even noticed myself consciously give up on the job and just continue answering bullshit questions until they let me leave. The myriad of self-loathing that follows usually last between a few hours and several days.
This is especially hard on my wife, who tries as hard as she can to help me as I struggle through whatever this is. I love her more than I have ever loved anything. Having said that, she loves me more. Being completely realistic, in every relationship someone loves the other one more. And in ours, it's her. I don't know why I find this relevant, I suppose it makes me feel guilty. Logically I don't know why it should if it has to be one of us or the other anyway.
I heard somewhere that half of the people in the world have never made or received a phone call. I have no actual idea if that is correct, but it is so wildly ridiculous that I figure it must be. To be honest it doesn't matter because I only bring it up to demonstrate the absolute absurdity of how much more fortunate I am than other people. So really whether it's true or not is completely irrelevant. There are homeless people in my country who are far, far, far better off than a whole lot of people around the world. And those are the homeless people from my country, prospering by comparison.
I don't donate to charity. Not because I am against it, and not because I am some anti-everything moron, but because to me it feels more like buying permission to not feel guilty. Guilty that I throw away things people would kill for simply because I was born in the this part of the world.
I read once that there was a study done on babies in which a string was tied to their toes that was connected to a baby mobile of some kind. When the babies shook their legs the mobiles would rattle or something, and the babies would laugh. They let the babies get used to this for a while, and eventually they added more rattles to the mobiles, doubled or tripled them I think. And again, the babies all shook their legs and laughed. After some time with the bigger and better mobiles, the babies were switched back to the older and smaller mobiles. They still rattled when the babies shook their legs, but the babies didn't think they were fun anymore. Once they had experienced the better versions they were no longer interested in the old ones. What lovely human nature we all share.
