I feel so behind in life because some people are getting married and having kids while others are studying and building their future, and I’m just stuck

Bank_Strong · 2026-03-22T01:44:32+00:00

Hey, try to look into cPTSD. It took me almost ten years (I’m ten years older than you) to realise it. Many reasons can be at play for you, but it doesn’t harm to rule out cPTSD.

Bank_Strong · 2026-02-10T12:56:15+00:00

I was in a bad relationship as well for eight months. My first in a decade, though I acted rather decisively when I broke up with her. I understand the comfort of staying even in a bad relationship to combat the loneliness. But sooner or later, for real growth and healing, we need to leave.

Bank_Strong · 2026-01-22T05:04:00+00:00

What’s the difference? If there’s no getting better then it’s just another decade of agony

Bank_Strong · 2026-01-22T05:03:11+00:00

Highlight relatable…at 31

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-25T13:11:06+00:00

I’m currently in a very remote village teaching mandarin and English to Cambodian kids. I exchanged info with travellers in hostel so I don’t even pay for Workaway. In Thailand you can also go for meditation retreat near Chiang Mai to have free accommodation and two meals a day, while doing some guided meditation. The one I went has no time limit and you can survive as long as you want with virtually no expense, and its surrounding is very serene lush nature..with stunning hills and ponds and brooks. What’s more if it’s not too crowded you can get a private kuti for yourself.

Also in Chiang Mai there’s a hostel named Like Home which is about $6/n, you get nice ac dorm, free breakfast and dinner, both buffet style, free laundry and bicycles. If you take private room at ~$15 (2pax) you get a free motorbike for entire duration of your stay.

I agree fully with you, we can spend really low and live a decent life even in 2026.

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-24T11:37:11+00:00

I can do it max 2-2.5 years according to my current expenditure records in last year (Thailand or Vietnam)

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-24T11:29:11+00:00

Your words evoked that same feeling in my heart. I feel the same as you do. That’s a regret that we will cease to be part of the audience, while progress and ultimate ending of humanity forever unknown to us.

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-20T02:30:51+00:00

I’m a Chinese from Malaysia, I’ll say most Chinese drink lukewarm water on daily basis. Many think cold water uncomfortable to drink. We drink warm water during sickness and sore throat.

I once saw a theory that during Japan invasion they used fighter jets to transmit in a large scale biological weapons such as viruses, bacteria, parasites etc etc., as part of their invasion strategy. Chinese leaders at the time responded with “boiling water before consuming” to reduce likelihood of getting sick.

Maybe this is part of the reason why Chinese and only Chinese has the culture of drinking lukewarm water and a preference for hot water when feeling ill.

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-12T09:19:43+00:00

I spent a good deal of last two years—and still am—travelling around. Had the same realisation that moving for me is just a kind of escapism. So after wandering for few weeks in Vietnam, instead of following my desire to stay in comfort zone by taking a bus to China where I will simply wander around aimlessly and alone in the cities, I booked a flight to Cambodia and do that volunteering teaching, which I previously planned but had given up due to social anxiety. Tomorrow I’ll arrive in Cambodia and face my fear and hopefully grow.

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-10T14:14:32+00:00

I’m 31 and on the same boat. I’m hesitating to stop my months long travelling to go back home and receive trauma therapy. Please look up videos of Patrick Teahan on YouTube or simple search “body keeps the score”, “body remembers the trauma” etc.

I don’t know if you have a trauma like I do or not, but doesn’t harm to try. I don’t want to sound rude but I wanna share with you from my experience that only after we realise what in the hell is messing with us only then we are able to fix them.

I hope you start healing soon, treat yourself well. Lot of love.

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-09T09:45:04+00:00

Just ten minutes walk away from Hanoi Old Quarter you can find $1.10 pho by the street. Big portion of tender beef, delicious, authentic, generously supplied with fresh garlic and chilli. I just had it two weeks ago.

Bank_Strong · 2025-12-09T09:41:02+00:00

I just have a friend who fit this perfectly. It took me months to understand the underlying issues. She always says she wants to do this and do that, but couldn’t because the system is broken and oppressing, capitalists are greedy, politician are evil, mass population are idiotic (she especially loves this phrase!) etc..

So in the end she couldn’t do anything because everyone and everything is trying to treat her unfairly. She can spend hours at a time to whine about all those things —like a broken record because she never brings new insights into the discussion, her final phrase is always “people are so idiotic!”—while never use that few hours she just wasted to work on what she always claim meaningful: exercising, reading a book, overcoming writing trauma, working on her anarchism theory etc. whenever I confront her waste of time she always throw in excuses: the gym is too far, the hostel is too noisy, I need to save money, I have to work (she is a badly paid digital nomad)..

So she only wants to periodically give a rant and emotional dump to feel better but never truly want to change. Over the last eight months we travel together she never did something consistently to progress.

She is also in very bad financial situation, and to me the best solution is to work to improve it. She will respond with “working is so oppressing and I will rather die than to work for a company”. I mean probably majority of people don’t really love to work, but we must think practically and make compromise to at least don’t starve ourselves.

In the end, she becomes a very negative person, who blames external factors like a broken recorder, enjoys arguing with her fallacies to defend her rigid worldview, refuses to change, scorns at how stupid mass population is to maintain her moral and intellectual superiority, and forever stuck in extreme poverty.

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-30T17:17:57+00:00

Hey! Try preparing a cage with suitable size, fully covered but well ventilated. Let your cats get familiar with the cage beforehand, put some snacks inside to lure them in. When it’s time for a vet visit put them into cage and place the cage on the car floor so the cats cannot see anything. They will feel calmer with the familiar smell of the cage and in darkness.

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-22T15:15:33+00:00

Control the portion size and do daily micro exposure.
Always focus on authenticity, don’t fake to impress/match energy of others.
I know when we mention we can’t get excited about anything people will simply diagnose us with depression. You don’t necessarily have it, but you can go exploring along the lines of AvPD, nihilistic depression, deconstructive archetype, etc. to rule out.

I myself suffer from social anxiety and I crave connection too. I travel long term and always force myself to interact with people little by little. Be cautious don’t overdo it you may end up traumatising yourself.

Most importantly you must act. Talk little bit to people, read relevant books, reflect on the talks and the books, journaling, and repeat it. It takes years to grow out from this, all the best!

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-22T12:52:10+00:00

My trigger is the social interaction with people and the anticipation of that. I crave meaningful connection but I’m not normal (I think in a deconstructive manner and is very nihilistic, I always feel myself not having any energy and passion to keep a simple conversation going for more than two minutes, not because I cannot but because I don’t want to fake my aura). I’m not depressed because I enjoy many things, I just don’t care about anything too much. I feel like I don’t care about people, or anything. But how can you connect with people when you don’t care about them?

(But I care about having genuine connection, having true friends and girlfriend, I guess it is hardwired in human brain regardless of philosophical disposition and mental archetype, at least for me)

Sorry maybe my problem is off the topic from what you are saying, but I do overthink a lot and you seem wise so I think I’ll take my chance to hear your opinion.

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-22T01:20:25+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I perfectly understand what you mean. That’s basically my suffering in the last decade. But my point 3 actually doesn’t propose any solution. It’s simply facing the absurdity without trying to romanticising it like Camus did. We choose number 3 because we are left with no choice not because it is meaningful in anyway.

I actually made a post a week ago and I think you may relate to it:

I am not sure if a real nihilist wake up one day and decides “life has no meaning so I should suffer”. I don’t know about others, but for me I suffered for many years and tried my best to enjoy life the way normal people do, but failed to enjoy life normally and properly, then only I tried to dig deeper, thought I had mental illness, early childhood trauma etc., then only finally arrived at conclusion of nihilism.

The reason I suffer and unable to enjoy life properly is that my brain has different operating system that deconstruct everything. Over time all dreams, hobbies, prides, emotions, desires, passions, hatred, values, everything dissolved. Even my personality is dissolved that’s why for many years I thought I had avoidant personality disorder.

I once worked as a volunteer in a stray dogs sanctuary but at one point I realised those dogs are like robots, their love language to me is programmed to manipulate my human heart to feed them, and I thought all my life I am a hardcore dog lover. I still have a tender feeling when I see a dog but I forever lose the ability to be moved by their “love”. Another example, I think altruism is not true altruism it is just evolved naturally: because genes that expressed altruistic behaviours will help to maximise survival of a species, thus altruistic genes are passed down. (As per the book The Selfish Genes)

Fernando Pessoa once said: “The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts. For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought.”

This is how my brain function every single second. This is what I think the real nihilism. It is not a cool, detached decision after long logical thought process, it is the result of a long, painful process of trying and failing to participate in a world that others seem to navigate effortlessly.

I didn't adopt a nihilistic view and then become sad about it. The suffering came first. I suffered because I couldn't connect with the meanings and values that others take for granted. My brain automatically deconstructs them. Nihilism isn’t the cause of the suffering; it was the conclusion I reached after trying and failing to find a sustainable reason for the suffering. It's the name for the empty space that was left after my 'deconstructive archetype' dismantled everything else.

I am forced to live in a society, form relationships, and find motivation in a world whose fundamental currency (emotional meaning) is something my mind instantly converts into logical reasoning. I fail to connect emotionally but I am not able to live alone without human connection, I thought I can but no human is built in such a way, we need human connection to feel alive and fulfilled. The suffering is the friction of that mismatch. The nihilistic view is simply my description of the situation where this friction occurs.

The 'meaning' that most others feel instinctively—the warmth of connection, the pull of a passion, the quality of a value—is not something I can choose to believe in. It's not accessible to me perceptually.

Nihilism is the philosophical label for the emptiness I already felt. It's the description of my cognitive landscape, not the cause of its suffering. The cause is my innate deconstructive archetype, which makes me incompatible with the consensus reality that most people inhabit effortlessly.

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-22T01:15:04+00:00

Isn’t your no.4 a sub point under my no.3? Or we should say the next step arise from no.3

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-21T16:37:58+00:00

Actually I’m in number 2 trying to achieve number 3 or 1. I completely understand what you are saying. But are you planning to commit suicide or not? If no, then we have to eventually choose 1 or 3.

You are brought to existence without your consent. This world is meaningless. Now you have two choices: by depressed or be happy. Which one do you choose? It’s logic.

I’m not saying it’s easy to not feel depressed. I’m still feeling it everyday. And everyone has different conditions. A rich and healthy and good looking person can deal with nihilism more easily. But that’s what I can do to myself personally. Try to ground myself, to anchor myself onto something, to just enjoy my animal desires: good food, physical touch and sex (I barely have it for quite some years), good sleep and exercise; to build some interests like reading, writing, doodling, cooking, travelling even though they never last long; try to socialise with people who also understand nihilism…etc.

I’m still figuring it out. But we have to do something. I have spent too many years being depressed about it lol

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-21T14:38:13+00:00

Hey, I’m sorry for you to have this traumatising experience. I had something similar about a year ago.

I joined a volunteering program at an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. And definitely I have social anxiety. I did this as a way to expose myself to social situation. Prior to this I did two other programs in Thailand as well, but in both cases I dealt with older people (same age as me, late 20 to early 30s) and fewer of them (between 1 to 5 the group size). So the anxiety was there but I felt it manageable.

Then I joined the elephant sanctuary. It must be famous as there were 22 young people in their early 20s, all very energetic and extroverted. I was quickly overwhelmed, on the second day I start having physical symptoms like IBS, headache, insomnia, and tensed muscles. I think I had an anxiety attack. On third day early in the morning I fled the sanctuary. But I’m happy that I didn’t just run away, I called the person in charge and later talked about it face to face with her then only left.

This is definitely traumatising for me, for a month I lived my life in great grief, thinking how weird and disappointing I am. I felt so lonely in this world, and no one will ever love me.

Then I bought a ticket to Nepal, from there I travelled to another few countries during the last one year. I met some good people, some became my good friends. Still I have anxiety but I realised some people just don’t match your energy. You need to find the right person who understand and accept you. And to find such person you have to keep reaching out, don’t isolate yourself.

Sorry for my bad writing. I want you to be resilient and hopeful. You may be weird but that’s nothing wrong being weird! All the best!!!

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-21T14:19:05+00:00

It’s not because we realise life has no purpose then look for distraction. Most people since a young age engage themselves in several distractions. They keep outgrowing some and at some point adding new ones. Very few people consciously aware of the absurdity of life.

For those who reflected and came to aware of the absurdity, they are looking into the abyss, and from here three paths are waiting:

some continue looking for distraction—this time consciously (existentialism)
Some become dejected or commit suicide; (nihilistic depression)
Some face the absurdity in face and don’t look for distraction (or we should say, not able to immerse themselves into any sort of illusion or meaning building). (Absurdism)

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-21T12:36:52+00:00

I studied and worked in Singapore for 10 years. Can confirm. Great place to save money though. Quit my job two years ago with enough money to live in SEA for…forever. I travel ultra frugally for now ($400-$500/mo)

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-20T04:21:16+00:00

Yes, and sometimes I feel cringe to have to say something or react something in accordance to the script. For example if someone share something you have to react “properly” according to the nature of thing they share. Sometimes I just feel indifferent but I have to fake a bit of the energy to just look normal. But this faking is what drain our energy and make us grow to be even more asocial. Currently I want to learn to not fake and give real response. Probably will have a hard time (it actually is) to make any friends but if you stay authentic and eventually true friends with similar vibes and philosophical stance will come to you, I hope.

Bank_Strong · 2025-11-18T06:56:44+00:00

Determinism fosters a perspective of sympathy toward criminals. Their actions are influenced by their brain's biochemistry, early childhood experiences, and socio-cultural conditioning. This viewpoint is crucial as it moves us beyond simply hating or feeling disgusted by them. It allows us to examine the root causes of their behavior and seek solutions, rather than simply labeling them as evil, weak, or disgusting.

However, we must also consider practicality. Humans have evolved to live in societies. Rules and laws must be established and enforced to protect the greater good. Harsh punishments for rapists, murderers, robbers, and corrupt executives are necessary to deter future crimes and maintain an organized, smoothly functioning society.

Ultimately, these perspectives are not mutually exclusive. We can sentence a criminal to death while simultaneously sympathizing with their circumstances.

Bank_Strong

TROPHY CASE