u/ICUMTHOUGHTS

Not even in a dramatic way. Not in a “I hate everyone” way either. More like this deep exhaustion with existing as yourself every single day.

Lately I’ve realized I don’t even fantasize about success anymore. I fantasize about distance.

Sometimes it’s the military. Especially the Navy. Being stuck somewhere far away from land in a submarine or on a carrier where life is simple and structured and nobody asks you who you’re supposed to become. Just wake up, follow orders, exist as part of something bigger than yourself. Brotherhood, routine, purpose. Maybe I romanticize it because I grew up on Hollywood style military movies and always wanted that feeling of belonging and discipline.

Sometimes it’s the mountains. Uttarakhand, Himachal, somewhere cold and quiet. I imagine packing a bag, disappearing to some small town, working a tiny job at a tea shop or becoming a low paid teacher in a private school. Barely surviving financially but mentally at peace because nobody expects greatness from me anymore. No corporate grind, no chasing status, no “potential,” no endless comparison. Just enough money to eat, sleep, and exist quietly.

And the weird part is I know these are escapist fantasies. I know I probably don’t even have the courage to actually leave. I struggle badly with adapting to new places and always have. When I was younger my family wanted me to go to a boarding school and I couldn’t do it because of homesickness and later social anxiety. Years later I dropped out of college for the same reason and lied about it for 8 years. That fear never fully left me.

I think what hurts is realizing I don’t actually want luxury or success as much as I want relief from myself.

My days feel blurry now. I wake up already tired of being me. I don’t even distract myself properly anymore. No movies, no games, no doomscrolling. Time just passes while I sit inside my own head. And over the years I’ve developed this weird emotional attachment to the idea of disappearing. Not necessarily dying, just becoming unreachable. Like vanishing from the version of life everyone expects me to live.

I don’t know if this makes sense or if anyone relates to this at all. Maybe I’m just burnt out. Maybe depressed. Maybe weak. I genuinely don’t know anymore.

But sometimes I wonder how many people walk around carrying this exact feeling while pretending to function normally.

This feels like the nth time this has happened to me.

I gave a competitive exam in the 3rd week of March and had a whole plan afterward. I was supposed to rest for the remaining days of March and then start preparing for another exam I’ve been targeting since last year.

Then I got sick during the last few days of March. Recovered by the first week of April. And somehow that tiny break completely killed all momentum.

Since then, I’ve done almost nothing academically. I only randomly solve a few questions here and there just to cope with the guilt and anxiety caused by my executive dysfunction.

And the worst part is, this has been my pattern forever.

I have time. Enough time to get decent results even with my dumb ahh brain. But I’ll keep waiting, procrastinating, overthinking, doomscrolling, and mentally exhausting myself until the adrenaline finally kicks in and I’m forced into survival mode.

The exam I gave in March had 90+ days available for preparation.

Instead I brute forced the entire syllabus in around the last 25 days. Learned a completely new programming language, wrote sizeable chunks of code, covered almost everything in panic mode… and then completely crashed afterward.

Now every evening feels suffocating.

The days keep passing. The anxiety about cutoffs and selection probabilities keeps building. And the regret is unbearable because I know I’ve put myself in this exact situation again.

For context, I’m scoring around 68/100 in that exam. I still have a sizeable probability for final selection but it's still an edge case.

And all I can think is if I had just used those wasted days properly, I probably would’ve been safe.

Nobody talks enough about the psychological damage of being the “hopeful unemployed son” in an Indian middle class family. Not the completely hopeless one, the one who gave up because there's peace in that but the one who is always “close.” Close to clearing exams and interviews. Close to finally becoming someone everyone can relax around.

I graduated in 2024 from a tierless CSE college. My entire B.Tech cost around 3.5 lakhs and we had to take a loan for it. During campus placements, I actually got a job offer around 3.5 LPA with a 1.5 year bond in Hyderabad. It wasn’t a dream job. The pay wasn’t great but it was something in the already horrible tech job market in 2023-24, especially for average students from unknown colleges. Anyone from these colleges knows off campus hiring feels almost impossible unless you’re exceptional or extremely lucky.

I wanted to join, but my parents told me to wait for better opportunities, better on campus placements, off campus jobs, something with a better salary.

So I waited and that was a mistake. A mistake of trusting in my capacity, capability and my faith in parental support.

Some of my friends accepted the offer. Today they already have 1.5-2 years of experience and have switched to better paying jobs. I stayed behind.

After graduation I kept applying everywhere. Sometimes I got rejected immediately. Sometimes I got very close to interviews and still got rejected. Eventually I shifted heavily toward government exam preparation in 2025 because at least there the process felt objective.

And honestly? I wasn’t doing badly. I started clearing stages. Getting close in banking exams. Getting close in IT recruitment exams. Appearing for interviews. Living in this constant state of “maybe the next one.”

But psychologically, this kind of life destroys you slowly. Because society doesn’t respect “almost.” You’re either employed or you’re not. Either settled or not.

For as long as I can remember, my parents have spent years speaking about me to relatives in this apologetic tone about everything that is me. It's like they feel apologetic of my mere existence. And relatives respond with pity instead of expectation and the pity kills something inside you.

Today my mom came upstairs and suddenly told me to start applying for private jobs again while waiting for a government result and I panicked hard.

The thing is, my mom is actually a good person. She mostly believes in me. She worries, but she still has hope somewhere. A lot of the pressure she puts on me is because she herself is constantly absorbing stress from the environment around her.

My father is different.

Every afternoon he comes back from work carrying this cloud of negativity, anxiety, despair and hopelessness into the house. Me and my brother literally avoid interacting with him sometimes because all he brings into an already mentally exhausting environment is more stress.

And then he unloads all of that onto my mother, who herself cannot handle stress well, so eventually it spills onto me too.

The entire emotional atmosphere of the house starts revolving around fear. Fear of money, failure, society. Fear of “what will happen.” And underneath all of this is something uglier that I hate admitting.

I resent my father deeply. I've always resented him. Not just because of the job decision. Not just because of the anxiety around money. But because every time I look at him, I see the traits I’m most terrified of becoming. The indecisiveness, fear the constant apologetic tone, the lack of confidence, the panic,the feeling of always shrinking yourself in front of the world.

It feels like he spent his entire life afraid, and now I’m living inside the consequences of that fear. And the worst part is realizing how much of him exists inside me. That’s what really scares me. Inheritance. Psychological inheritance. What I am mentally and emotionally, I see it in him.

The truth is I haven’t seriously touched development in over a year. I’ve been studying QRE, GA, GS, theoretical IT, government job syllabi. The few support work I’ve done mostly involved using AI tools and patching things together without deeply staying connected to hardcore development. Enough to repay my monthly education loan. Meanwhile the private tech market keeps getting worse.

So now I feel stuck between two timelines, the software engineering path that stalled after graduation, and the government exam path that still hasn’t fully materialized.

Sometimes I feel guilty for hating my father because I know life probably crushed him long before I understood what adulthood even was. But another part of me is angry that I grew up watching fear become the emotional language of the house. No confidence, risk taking or belief. Just survival, anxiety, shame, and damage control.

And now I’m 25, kinda unemployed, preparing for competitive exams, watching my friends move ahead while my parents explain my existence to relatives.

I think unemployment after a point stops being about money entirely. It becomes identity erosion.

You stop feeling like a son and start feeling like a burden people are trying to emotionally manage with hope, pity, and excuses.

And maybe that’s the reality. You begin to understand your parents more at the exact same moment you start resenting them the most. And maybe that’s what finally breaks you. Realizing that life, your existence, and everything around you comes with an asterisk. Everything is conditional. Respect, love, hope, patience. People believe in you while you’re “trying.” Society respects you when you’re “becoming something.” Families stay hopeful while there’s still a visible future to point at. But the longer you stay unfinished, the more your existence starts feeling like something everyone has to explain, justify, or defend.