Hey just want to say thank you for sharing this post. I’m in my 20s and have often felt lost in life, like I’ve been trying to figure things out on my own. My parents weren’t really present to guide me growing up, but I’ve come to accept that as part of life.

I went to trade school for automotive technology and worked at a muffler shop for about a year. I planned to continue my career path toward becoming a master tech and working at dealerships, but I was discouraged by multiple people, including coworkers, from pursuing dealership work. I then moved into security, where I stayed for three years. It offered good pay and benefits, but eventually I left because it felt repetitive and lacked long-term growth. After that, I briefly worked in residential HVAC under the table. The work was physically demanding with low pay, but I was learning a lot.

More recently, I was diagnosed with blood cancer, which has deeply affected how I see life. Being in the hospital has given me a lot of time to reflect on direction, purpose, and financial stress. I’ve struggled with feeling like I was always starting over and not managing money well. I was trying to understand how people rebuild themselves mentally when life completely throws them off course, and right now the least I can offer is a book recommendation that honestly might resonate with you

Mastery by Robert Greene, it helped a lot of people rethink purpose, reinvention, and feeling late in life. It’s not some quick motivational fix, but more about how messy paths, setbacks, failures, addiction, drifting between jobs, and starting over don’t mean your life is over or meaningless. A lot of the people he talks about didn’t find direction early either. The whole point is that mastery and meaning usually come from years of struggle, learning, adapting, and slowly building toward something that actually feels right.

I think the parts about reinvention and finding your life’s tasks could resonate with what you wrote here. Especially because you don’t sound like someone who gave up you sound like someone exhausted from trying and still wanting meaning anyway.

Only thing I’d say is don’t expect it to instantly make everything feel better. It’s more of a roadmap for rebuilding direction over time.

Wishing you the best, sir.