My life is almost a total failure. I am in my 20s, totally broke, living with my parents, no job, no career, no future, living in cambodia with no opportunities and no way to claw my way out. I’ve looked on Indeed, there’s nothing. Zero. Zilch. My college degree(computer engineering) got me nowhere. Besides that, my country is a toilet now and rapidly becoming worse with an insane cost of living. Everything is going down the tubes and I am powerless to even cushion myself against the imminent impact. I think if nothing else I just want to kms .
I don’t think I’ve ever felt this awful in my life. Thanks. Sorry for this mess and I know I’ll invite a lot of ridicule. I’m sitting in the dark doing nothing right now.
Your life has barely started. It can’t be a failure when it’s barely begun. You spend 18 years with no real control over yourself or your trajectory, then you finally begin to make a few relevant decisions for yourself. Even if you’re 29, you really only start your life when you’re 19-20. That’s 10 years out of 50+, assuming you live to be at least 70. You have only lived a small fraction of your life.
I won’t pretend to know the unique challenges you’re facing, the difficulities of finding work in your region/with your degree, or the social/economic struggles you’re facing because I am so far divorced from your life that any direct discussion is so meaningless. I would never have the relevant information and context, so I can’t suggest what you should do in a tangible way. What I can say, is this: find what you want to measure your life in, and work towards that. If you value your life through work and wealth, I can understand why you’d feel the way you do, but there far more ways to be prosperous, and things you can focus on.
A healthy dose of positive nihilism would do you wonders: each and every one of us is so tiny, so insignificant, that the difference between a “successful” and “unsuccessful” life in the terms you’ve defined literally do not matter. You and Elon Musk will both die and decompose, and regardless of either of your impact on the world, this rock we’re riding around the sun will continue to support life for a time, and one day everything humanity has ever conceived will be dust, and our sun will explode, and the universe won’t care if you lived with your parents or owned a mansion. The only things that matter are the things we, individually, give meaning to. If you choose to find meaning and value in creating art then your work has meaning and value. If you choose to find meaning and value in helping others find joy and happiness, then dedicate yourself to your friends, your family and your community, because that has meaning and value. If you want to experience the world through literature and media, then engaging with that material has meaning and value. No one else can define what matters to you in this world, because they’re not you.
I’m sorry that what you’ve spent time and energy on isn’t panning out for you. I really, truly am. But step back, and think about if those things matter to you because they matter to you, or because everyone else has told you it’s what a successful, prosperous life looks like. Then consider what your version of a good and meaningful is, and chase that. Many people waste 10, 15, 20+ years on things that they ultimately realize don’t bring them joy. In a way, you’re lucky to have found out sometime in your 20s that what you’ve been working on isn’t leading you where you want to be. It took me until 33.