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Old Dec 29, 2016, 06:28 PM
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Rose76 Rose76 is offline
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Member Since: Mar 2011
Location: USA
Posts: 12,852
I'ld be the last person to claim that employment is a wonderful antidote to depression. I've toiled at jobs I hated that made me feel trapped and miserable. At some jobs, I felt inadequate and the resultant anxiety was one of the worst things I've ever experienced. On the other hand, unemployment, at times, has brought be close to homelessness. Plenty of people have been driven to suicide by loss of a job. (My cousin was.)
Therein lies the huge dilemma. Humans need to have work to do that earns them the necessities of life and freedom from dependence on others. However, a lot of jobs can be miserable experiences. That choice between dependence and what can seem like wage slavery has driven plenty of unhappy people over the edge.

Getting a job is absolutely no guarantee of recovery from depression. But hanging around the house in bed, on the couch or in front of a screen is pretty much a sure-fired way to stay depressed.

The point is - you gotta do something. If you sit around waiting to figure out a perfect plan, you'll never do anything. And you'll sink deeper into the pit.

I'm sorry, Dechan, that the job is stressing you big time. I've been there. One thing I discovered is that, after a whike, you might feel differently. A long time ago, I took and quit/lost six jobs in one year. I disliked every one of them. I decided that I would stay with the next job for six months, no matter how much I hated it. At first, the job felt uninteresting. And I felt great anxiety or resentment about the interpersonal aspects of dealing with co-workers. That changed radically after six months. Opinions I had formed of people during the first few weeks of work turned out to be wrong. People who had seemed nasty, when I started, ended up not being so bad at all. I even started to have fun with these very individuals. Some of the people whom I got along with, at first, came to strike me as weasles that I wouldn't trust much, once I knew them. It astonished me how six minths into the job, it seemed like a different world. Also, the job, which seemed like something I just couldn't quite do well at, turned out to be something I could do as well as the next person. We tend to have more ability than we realize . . . sometimes.

I was in and out of schools and jobs. I won't say that, eventually, I found the career of my dreams. Actually, I didn't. But I did keep trying things. When you rack up failure after failure, that gets awful hard to do. But trying anything was better, to my way of thinking, than hanging around my parents' house. (And they weren't the type to let me feel too comfortable hanging around.)

You never know what's around the next corner. You never know! I moved from place to place. After one move far from my origins, I failed and came back to my home territory. But I came back with a gun. I wanted to have a total escape plan, if I ended up broke and homeless. It so happened, I landed in a nice job. That was eventally followed by a crappy job. I've alternated between jobs I liked and jobs I didn't. But it can be amazing what's around the next corner, if you just take the trouble to go to the end of the block and hang a left, or a right.