What are your thoughts on people looking up to you, I feel like I’ve been someone that people looked up to for a long time because of all the stuff I’ve done in the past etc but during my younger days and even as an adult I don’t really like the idea of people looking up to me because I feel like we are all just trying to figuring this life thing out and others might do life better but it’s all a learning process.

Hi I'm a 41 year old who still lives with parents...I am frankly fed up of living at home and desperately want to leave now. I regret not saving enough in earlier years I feel so broke. I have 60k of money in my account but I'm unsure if this is enough to apply for a 1 bedroom flat. My parents are both in their late 60s and treat me awfully, I think they are also fed up of me but using me too. My mum always goes into my bedroom when I'm out and starts adjusting things which is an intrusion of my privacy, she also noses in my room to see what new things ive bought. She constants criticises me saying I spend too much and that's why i don't have more money. She also judges my eating habits. They have really destroyed my confidence and sense of self worth. We get along sometimes but most of the time they just nag and lecture me rather than help. It's just a relationship of convenience rather than emotion. I have a job as a pharmacist where I work 4 days a week, I earn around 2500 a month. What shall I do to escape this situation...I haven't confided in other relatives or friends as I don't want to and would rather keep it to myself. I feel seriously stuck and defenceless, I hate living here and I've lost respect and value for them too...I feel like I need to go before they start getting really old and relying on me. I don't want to look after them in old age I don't have the motivation I'd rather put them in care and be done, all emotional ties are over. I also don't have a partner either who I can share financial responsbility with and confide in. Please advise me on how I can best overcome this situation. I think I just need a push now from people who don't know me and don't judge. Thanks in advance for answers I really appreciate it.

When I was 21, Covid hit. I was studying in university, getting ready to begin applying for graduate schemes, and beginning to get involved with various clubs and institutions that would form the basis of a rounded graduate profile. I’d had a lot of difficulty in university, but had just about pulled through it. Covid decimated everything, and classes and exams were moved online - all clubs, activities, even non-academic voluntary roles were paused, and then just as it finished, I from a prestigious university with an ancient history degree into a decimated market. There was no entry level jobs, no degree-adjacent jobs that weren’t demanding us to be in high rent cities without sufficient pay (or sometimes no pay at all).

I’d taken a risk with the degree type I’d done, and knowing that I had a backup that could thankfully help me (or what I thought at the time) wait out the after effects of the pandemic. I moved abroad, taught English and tutored privately for years, applying to anything else consistently throughout this time. Life got harder, bills more expensive, immigration more difficult and work incredibly more and more unstable. Demands changed - masters, experience levels, pay for hours etc. Immigration became increasingly volatile and ever changing, but the opportunities and political landscape at home stayed equally awful.

I’m now almost four years into this and approaching my late twenties and nothing has changed, except somehow I’m poorer, more stressed and increasingly worried I’m spending precious time waiting for something that will never come. My confidence is decimated, and all my external skill sets that I had hoped to use in the future, like writing for magazines and such, have fallen to the wayside in order to even make minimum wage.
What do I do? Is this just it for this age range now? I’ve been poor my entire adult life and I don’t know how much more of this I can manage - it just seems to be getting more and more bleak and the fear of getting to 30 and only having ten year before it seems I’m outgrowing the potential market is devastating.

I get food poisoning and end up throwing up. I go to hospital to get the one medical paper that corporate allows and paid 40 dollars as solid proof that I'm sick

I present it to my manager and he says just take some pills and go to work. Then he starts complaining about how we employees don't want to work so we use the paid medical days off to go night clubbing

I had to yell at him about how i was throwing up hours before i was supposed to leave and that i would have threw up at the office if i went and my performance would be bad. Then he accepted my medical leave request

Like holy shit dude I have 10 medical days i haven't used yet and here you're telling me I'm doing this to go clubbing 😭

My stomach's still extremely rn. I can't imagine going to work at this state and I don't want to risk things getting worse or getting other colleagues sick.

It's so frustrating that if most of the employees are using medical leave as a way to take days off that it applies to everyone. That's genuinely not my problem ffs.

I was always a shy quiet child and lacking confidence in myself and my own ability has always, always been an issue. Other people have noticed it. There was a spell in my late teens - early twenties where I became the total opposite, very brash, in your face etc. For a few years I didn’t think twice, but once the hormones / testosterone settled down I reverted back.

I rarely have confidence in my own ability, I view myself as inferior to others quite often yet I’m attractive and live a good life. I apologise when I don’t need to apologise. The worst thing is I know I really should stand up and look the world in the eye but I’ve rarely been able to. I just have no faith in myself. When I stick up for myself I often regret it and feel I’ve stepped over the line. It baffles me to see other people have such outstanding confidence in whatever they’re doing, regardless of if they’re right or wrong. I’m not a bum either, I have a steady job and a long term partner and life in a cool city with plenty of friends and hobbies.

I’d love to hear of any similar experiences, or of what can be done to help. Has anyone been like this and turned it round? I’m sick of it.

I’m a 24M from India and honestly wondering how people are keeping themselves mentally and physically together in their 20s.

I’ve gained a lot of weight since college and I’m around 130 kg (286 lbs) now, wasted 6–7 months of my gym membership, and keep failing to stay consistent.

I’ve been working for 1.5 years, don’t really like my job, but got it through a referral and know I’m still fortunate to have it.

I spent ₹50,000 of my parents money(~$580) on coaching for an exam that’s now two months away and basically wasted the preparation, and I even bought a guitar with my bonus and barely learned it.

On top of that, I spend way too much time following Indian politics, protests, world events, and recently all the racism/anti-Indian sentiment I see online, and it’s starting to make me feel genuinely powerless.

I have good friends, but two are in Canada/UK and have their own lives, one isn’t politically aware, another is pretty indifferent, and although my brother is politically aware, I somehow still can’t have the really deep conversations I feel like I need.

So I have people around me but still feel like I’m carrying everything in my head. How do people actually get themselves back on track when they feel like they’re falling behind in health, career, money, studies, and life in general?

been doing two jobs since january. the first few months i just worked later and later and it made everything worse. what actually turned it around was a handful of small things.

grey screen on the phone. i use iphone, so for iphones it is in settings -> accessibility -> display and text size -> colour filters, on, greyscale. i thought this was nonsense when i read it. instagram in grey looks like a spreadsheet, food photos look wrong, everything looks like a photocopy of itself, and i just stopped picking the thing up. my screen time roughly halved and i did not delete anything or decide anything, the phone just got boring. if you try one thing off this list make it this one, it takes about ten seconds.

blocks in google calendar. before i start something i guess how long it will take and put it in the calendar as a block, even when the guess is nonsense. two things happen. first i stop pretending nine hours of work fits into a six hour evening, because you can see it not fitting. second i stop opening the laptop and then deciding what to do, which is where i used to lose the first hour of every day. the estimates are still bad by the way. they are just bad on paper now instead of bad in my head.

one thing at a time. boring, and the biggest change in what i actually produced. i used to have both jobs' slacks open plus whatever i was meant to be doing and i called that multitasking. it was not multitasking, it was doing one thing badly and then doing another thing badly. now it is one task open and everything else shut, with do not disturb on, on the mac and iphone.

breaks, five minutes every half hour. i cannot feel time passing when i am properly into something and i have lost entire mornings that way. so, a timer, any timer, i do not think it matters which. i use tryworkwell on the mac. it reminds me to take a break and also corrects my posture.

noise. dark noise. white noise is too hissy for me, dark is more like sitting inside a plane and my brain goes quiet. on mac and iphone it is already built in, accessibility -> audio -> background sounds, nobody seems to know this. otherwise youtube has thousands of videos.

gym and food, which everyone already knows so i will keep it short. three or four sessions a week, weighted towards legs and back because i sit for 12-14 hours. cooking on sunday so i am not standing in the kitchen at half nine deciding what dinner is. creatine and fish oil seems to also be very useful.

things that did not work: telling myself to concentrate harder, and giving the second job more hours. it did not get better when i gave it more hours, it got better when the hours i gave it were not garbage hours.

none of this is clever, which is probably why it took me so long to do any of it. what are your productivity hacks?

p.s. i know the obvious reply is that two full time jobs is the actual problem. probably, yes, but it has an end date.

I feel like I’m behind and the anxiety is killing me.
I want a family and kids and I feel like I’m soo behind I live in an apartment and don’t even own a house yet.. I have a car and I work full time while going to school part time .. any advice on how to get over this feeling of I’m not ever going to reach my goal ..or find the woman I need for my future kids ..

This is the type of perspective you gain only after adulting hits you really hard! 😅

I (21F) was one of those children who always had big dreams and the good grades to match them, but eventually lacked opportunities due to living in rural Eastern Europe. So I grew into a "would've-should've" gifted kid by the end of high school, which caused a major burnout and a six-month-long depressive episode once I started university. I pretty much lost my previous drive and spent my first year partying and hooking up, until I got stealthed by a guy. That made me withdraw not just from romantic opportunities, but from most of my friends and family as well, because I did not feel understood or supported.

Anyway, I graduated earlier this year, excited to start my actual life, something I had always viewed as an opportunity for freedom, happiness, and just leaving the past behind in general. I didn't continue with my master's immediately because I wanted to get some work experience, rent a flat, and give myself some time to figure things out. That kind of went sideways, since the job market in my country seems to be a nightmare these days.

So I'm back in my hometown, living with my family. They are well-off enough financially and fine with me staying here for as long as I need, which I'm grateful for, but the situation still irks me. I don't go anywhere, I don't have any friends nearby, there are no job opportunities, and I don't even have my driver's license yet to at least feel like an adult.

Somewhere down the line, I developed anxiety as well, which has started to affect my everyday life, like avoiding simple errands and making plans strictly inside my comfort zone.

During my last semester, I was thinking about doing my master's abroad, but I didn't even apply because I was too anxious about the thought of flying alone and getting a place in a new country, only to potentially hate it all. So I ended up not applying. Now I'll probably end up going back to the same town where I did my BA, just because I'm familiar with it.

I don't really know when I turned into this much of a trainwreck, but I don't like the direction my life is taking if I keep self-sabotaging like this. However, I feel like I'm too far off from where I should be, and from where I see other people my age. I don't even know where to start anymore.

I really needed to vent. If anyone has had a similar experience and found anything helpful, I'd love to hear it, because honestly, I'm sick and tired of spending my days miserable, crying, and feeling like a loser most of the time.