It's a common question, one that I struggle to answer. At the most basic level I'm alive, I have food and water, have internet access, shelter from the elements, basic utilities. Certainly I'm surviving and I can probably continue to survive for years but that's really about it. I don't have a lot of money, it's not ever really been something I spend a lot or hoard, I basically just work enough to get by and keep some free time to myself and if I'm careful I'll have enough to spare to treat myself to something like a game I wanted to check out.
If anything goes wrong along the way anywhere I'm absolutely screwed and have no safety net of any kind to fall back on. This is just a risk I've accepted to continue living comfortably in the now.
Is this incredibly stupid and short sighted? Yes. There was a part of me that honestly kinda hoped I'd just die before having to worry about the future, before having to deal with other people and taxes and all the shit that you are forced into dealing with as a person living in modern society. I guess that's what depression is for me. Rather than try to face it head on I keep trying to pretend it doesn't exist and do the bare minimum just to keep living like I want to live, in the now.
I've kind of avoided talking directly about what the last 9+ years have been like for me to anyone, not my family or people who hang in the discords that I'm a part of. I just created this shell of normalcy for myself where I never really get into details about anything in my personal life in any meaningful way and just try and small talk my way out of conversations that pry in too close. Tonight though, I'm taking off my armor because fuck it.
I've mentioned this before in various places but never on my youtube channel. I dropped out of University. The specific reason is I just failed too many courses and didn't hand in enough assignments. There's a lot of things that led up to that and it's not that I wasn't smart enough or anything like that. It was a combination of taking some of the worst first year courses concurrently for work load combined with an unfortunate change in my living situation during year one and my absolute lack of personal ambition in the field I was taking. Hell I can even start this story the year before I even showed up on campus. Let's do that.
My final year of high school I didn't even bother registering for postsecondary because I felt I was too far behind to succeed there and I still had no clue what I even wanted to do. So I just graduated and decided to go back for an extra year of high school despite being an A student just to get more courses in and broaden my general knowledge with sciences cause I felt I'd need to be stronger in that area. I still had no real idea what I wanted to do at this point and my dad in his hubris decided that it'd be way more convenient for him if I just went to university in the same city as my grandparents so he could get out of paying for my student dorm. Yeah by the way I went to school on the money my parents saved up for a 4 year university education so I didn't even have my own cash on the line as motivation. But yeah after that came to light that basically narrowed all my options to whatever was available at the more local campus. I was always socially awkward and preferred to be on my own so I just signed up for whatever program there seemed less hands on with dealing in people and I had little confidence in my math or business skills and ended up in a psychology program. At one point I tried to get my dad to bite on a more specialized program degree at another university but he shot it down immediately because he literally didn't want to have to drive 6 hours to drop me off. So yeah at this point I was in full on "fuck that guy" mode and just did whatever. In case you can't tell, I'm still totally in that mode and can't wait to get whatever cash he has left when he finally gets put in a home. There's a whole history here that extends beyond him being too lazy to drive 6 hours for his son's education despite going on 12 hour road trips to play golf or spend 3 days in another city for work, but that's so far off topic I'll hit the character limit.
Speeding this along I get in because straight A's and the 95%+ in my 13th grade sciences definitely helped that. So I get to the program and I realize I need to allocate a lot of credits for first year into much more English based classes than I'd expected and a lot of my options were for shit I had 0 interest in like some hack sounding empathy course and stuff of that nature so instead I was like "I had really high marks in English I'll just take the intro level English course and 6 credits cleared rather than taking two courses I have actual 0 interest in taking, oh and I did good in art so I'll take the 6 credit intro art course too". Both of these courses simultaneously literally destroyed me first year to the point where by the midpoint I basically had to choose between one or the other or fail both because of the workload actually requiring on average 10 hours of homework a day just between these two courses and not counting all my psychology and philosophy stuff. That's how I failed my English course despite clearly being well versed in it because English courses are designed to overwork students to the point of lunacy so that your only actual options are to drop out or just learn to lie so hard that no one can call you out on it. Don't trust anyone who has an English degree because they will lie through their teeth to get through tough times. So now I've failed the equivalent of 2 courses worth of credits after first year so summer school to make up for that taking some easy laughable course for 3. Oh yeah and by the way less than 2 months into first year my grandmother passed away suddenly from cancer which yeah that sucks, but it sucks even more when you were living with her and have now gone from being the dependent to being the provider for your grandfather who's beginning to show signs of dementia and the loss of his wife certainly is accelerating that. I had a whole fun situation going on in the background for the next few years.
Well next semester I still need more language credits so second year history course without any first year history. Yeah that went as well as you'd expect. Also second year is where I learned that I love hearing about psychology and learning about it but have 0 interest in actually practicing or researching the field because mandatory class on the scientific method and all the layers of shit you need to do to design proper studies in psychology. Literally all of that stuff sucked the joy out of the course for me and I knew then that I couldn't see myself in this field by the end of the course. I ended up getting a 68 in the course but because it's mandatory I needed a 70 to pass so now I'm 2 courses behind again. But wait there was also a mandatory statistics course that I got a 69 in because I guess my teacher thought he was funny so yep now I'm three behind so cue more summer school to make up another first year credit and a second year except the second year course got cancelled last minute with no warning so I'm still two second year credits behind.
So yea after this academic probation which I didn't do any on campus events anyways so whatever. My whole time at uni I didn't even bother meeting my academic advisor nor did they ever contact me. This third year is where teachers start expecting essays and papers on subjects of your choice but by this point I had already lost what little drive I had for the field and just didn't feel qualified to even be in the program. I did my homework and did my tests, but I couldn't bring myself to write essays or papers on anything in the field because my confidence was completely shattered and I was just a shell of a student who'd show up and do well on tests and assignments but that's it. Once the university clued in on the fact I'd avoided doing all essay assignments for any course they expelled me for one year. I never bothered arguing it and honestly I'm kind of glad they did because if they hadn't I'd have just kept my head down and gone through the fourth year with the same mentality of a person who didn't see a future in what he was doing and felt like he'd be lying if he pretended to be any kind of authority on any topic he could write about in the field. As you might expect, my dad was pissed about this because it turns out his one neat trick to save a few 6 hour drives just cost him thousands for nothing. Good job captain asshat, your hubris has tanked your son for three years and you only realize it when it becomes clear your investment in him won't be making the returns you expected.
Throughout University I interacted with no one on campus and actually started my youtube after my first year just as a distraction for how shit my life was while going through that scenario. This is already way too long and we're only at the end of the '12-'13 school year for those who want to cross reference with my youtube channel.
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