First of all: I was/am a loser. I was a fat bespectacled kid who got physically bullied. I hid in the library during recess to avoid abuse. My parents berated me for being incapable of making friends and took me to a child therapist (who was no help at all). In college I felt alienated and borderline-suicidal for years. I slept 12 hours a day. And I spent most of my waking life, including long summer breaks, on the computer, mostly doing online role-play or hanging out in forums/chat rooms with strangers from around the world. Whenever I tried to explain my interest to a real-life acquaintance, they expressed disgust or secondhand embarrassment. I watched anime and played video games back when you had to hide it. I cried myself to sleep a lot. I got caught masturbating by my mom once. Lots of embarrassing stuff.

Anyway, in young adulthood I lost weight and immediately noticed that people (especially women) treated me differently, but I hated women universally because I understood them to be superficial and fickle. I also had severe trouble making (male) friends because I approached every interaction from a defensive stance where I was ready to respond aggressively to the vaguest hint of an insult. This was a defense mechanism I'd subconsciously developed.

>>34067364

This "defense mechanism" morphed into what people called a "sarcastic personality" but it went beyond sarcasm: I was frequently hurtful and purposefully cruel. People let it slide because they were intimidated by me, and because I never picked on people my own "size". Even though I knew this on some level, it was hard to square with my self-perception, because I still thought of myself as a loser and a nerd. Therefore, I didn't think of myself as "bad."

However something curious began to happen, where I began to develop an inflated ego right alongside my festering self-hatred. I began to believe I was unusually intelligent, insightful, sensitive, and/or special. In school I'd been an overachiever, but not to the degree of being "gifted," and in college my grades started to tank because I didn't care about my major. Lots of people reinforced this idea that I was somehow "smart" because I wasn't "athletic" and "outgoing," and therefore I must be "smart" and "introverted." And I acted and dressed in ways that reinforced this idea. But I had no real achievements to demonstrate my value or special-ness.

The way I began to justify this to myself was through my consumption habits. I got into "weird" movies and "weird" music. I trawled RYM and other sites for recommendations. I was even pretentious about things like cartoons and video games. I looked down on mainstream stuff. But I rarely, if ever, read an actual book, or engaged with actual criticism. I did not have much of an intellectual life. I just enjoyed (or sometimes pretended to enjoy) "weird" things for their surface aesthetic qualities. And I mostly enjoyed the sense of superiority I got from my taste. These were the peak hipster years, so it was a good time to be pretentious.

>>34067381

Anyway as the years went by and I graduated college it became clear that things weren't panning out like everyone expected. I graduated without honors, with few contacts, and with even fewer job prospects. I had a small circle of college friends who were generally nerds and spazzes like me. I had short, fraught relationships with women who were attracted to my self-styled "tortured artist" personality (even though I produced zero art), but these women usually expected me to reciprocate their interest in my life, and I was only interested in myself.

Whether you want to call it "narcissism" or not, I came to realize that my personality had become narcissistic. I had an over-inflated sense of superiority but at the same time a crippling self-hatred. I squared these contradictory ideas by simply never trying anything out of my comfort zone, whether professional, intellectual, or emotional. If I didn't try, I couldn't fail, and I feared "being a failure" the most, because it would confirm my suspicions that I wasn't so special at all. At the same time, the price of "not trying new things" was "hating myself for it." This seemed like a good trade-off to me. If I internalized all my suffering I could live in external comfort.

>>34067391

This attitude translated to my professional life, as I said. I took up job positions where I was underpaid so long as I'd be left alone. I had a famously antisocial personality at work because I hated being there and I hated my coworkers (to some degree, these were extensions of my own self-hatred over being an underachiever). I began to catch myself lying when acquaintances asked me how I was and what I was doing, because I was embarrassed of the truth. And the years flew by.

My romantic life was no better. I began to have short or medium-length relationships with women that I wasn't "really" attracted to, but who were attracted to me. I guess you could say I was dating "below" my league. This was because I was afraid of actually trying to land someone I viewed as my equal, and because I liked the sense of power that I had in these relationships, where I could be avoidant or dismissive and still be forgiven in the end, because the other person knew that I "didn't really care" and would simply walk away from the relationship if they reprimanded me.

>>34067401

My life sort of continued in this humdrum way and in the back of my mind I still believed I was special in some way, like a poor person who thinks they are a "temporarily embarrassed" rich person in reality. This became the foundation of my sense of self because I couldn't otherwise dare to confront how mediocre my life had turned out, especially in comparison to many of my peers.

The pandemic cost me my job and I moved back in with my parents, who have always been very reassuring but also afraid of having a real conversation with me, and I believe that this fearful "hands-off" no-criticism approach also contributed to my personality. But I don't blame them for anything.

Anyway, after the pandemic I had to rebuild my circle of friends and I naturally fell in with a group of guys around my age who seemed interesting, smart, cultured and/or witty, and in many cases they were, but were also total failures in some way or another. They all believed themselves to be special deep down, just like me, but they had nothing to show for it, and most of them were worse-off than I was: drug addiction, mental illness, etc.

>>34067413

Anyway this eventually became sort of a breaking point. I realized that my chronic procrastination, underachievement, foul mood, self-hatred, dismissive attitude, lack of friends, etc all stemmed from this idea that I was "special" like some kind of over-aged chuuni teenager who believed he would one day get superpowers.

This realization didn't cause my life to change overnight at all, but it did make me go through a private crisis where I started to think that my life was already a waste and I should just continue to chase creature comforts until death, because what could possibly be the point of trying to live purposefully after so much wasted time?

I'm not gonna say this was a solution for everyone, but what saved me was reading books. I had always had a reading habit as a kid but it had turned into a "browsing forums and texts" habit in adulthood. I began to read real novels and philosophy again, and it changed my life. First because I realized that a lot of the things I'd struggled with for years had already been discussed far more eloquently by smarter minds, second because I obtained insight into human psychology and the inner worlds of others (and empathy), third because I finally realized I was not "special," but not in bad way, just in a "I am one in a historic tribe of people who have sought knowledge/truth/wisdom" kind of way.

>>34067428

A few years passed where I read 40+ books a year and it started to make a difference. I was less interested in petty dramatics, less interested in video games and anime and power fantasies in general, less interested in getting blackout drunk on weekends (I forgot to mention that I'd used binge-drinking as a crutch over the years). It was a slow and sometimes imperceptible process.

Again I'm not trying to say reading alone will change your life, and it certainly hasn't landed me a girlfriend or a C-suite job, but it did slowly lead to other changes like an interest in history/news, and also a more legitimate sense of self-confidence where I realized that, for example, if I want to learn computer science or finance or French, I totally can, with effort and time.

And I began to relate to people because I tried, in good faith, to see things from their perspective. I used to instantly categorize people as various flavors of "NPC" and disregard their opinions, but I don't do that as much anymore. It made me much more agreeable, socially deft, and wise, and I no longer exuded desperation in every social interaction.

Nowadays I am materially not too different from where I was before I started, but I feel infinitely better about myself and my life, and thought I would share with someone in case they find it relatable/useful.

>>34067349
I read all of this, and I really liked this post anon. I know 4plebs exists, but I wish this board had a "hall of fame" or a best posts archive, because I would definately put this thread there. Thank you for sharing, I hope your life gets better.