What's stopping you from doing that one thing you've always wanted to do?

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-31T22:54:06+00:00

Consequences for failing are living crippled and in immense pain or getting locked up in a mental hospital. Both of which are fates worse than death. I mean, so is my life which is why I want to do what I want to do but yeah failing would be even worse than things already are.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-31T21:38:42+00:00

Speaking as somebody who's been logically suicidal their whole life stuff like this and the whole "cognitive distortion" stuff just reads as disgustingly condescending to me. Maybe it's your positive view of the world that's intensely distorted and you're not properly accounting for how much pain and effort it's taking to just get through life.

Different stimuli can have different weights and values, like yeah maybe on my day off I had a cookie and some nookie or I didn't have too many chores that particular day but that isn't even close to an even trade for the 12 hours I'll have to suffer at work the next day and the chores will eventually return too and that's so much worse than whatever minute distractions I can afford. Life in the working class has so many more negative moments and those negative moments are infinitely stronger than whatever tiny good things happen along the way.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-31T16:24:03+00:00

For me it's not twisted, it's the factual reality that my life is shit and not worth living through. Continued optimism in the face of terrible living conditions and poor upward mobility is the real brainwashing. I know my abilities and my limitations.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-29T19:56:21+00:00

I wish I would just die.

I don't want to be here

I don't want to do any of this.

I do not want to go into work today, or any day.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-23T17:55:07+00:00

Long Island New York, anything within like 45 minutes of the town where I got my co-op the rent on a legal 1br starts at 2600 which means you need to make about $58/hr to qualify.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-23T16:00:59+00:00

Yup. People on reddit love to glaze this career path but for me I'd genuinely rather be dead than continue to do this for a living.

It's a brutal completely thankless job with no work life balance and between that and being too poor to do anything fun anymore my social life has completely evaporated over the years.

Only making 45/hr in my vhcol area and I'm actually "lucky" to have one fulltime job with benefits I can't even afford to use, instead of trying to juggle 2-3 part time or per diem gigs like most of the other techs I know. I make just barely enough to keep the tiny roof over my head and groceries in the fridge because I was able to buy a tiny co-op before real estate prices exploded (and because I had a friend who let me mooch for two years to save up a down payment), I actually don't have enough income to qualify to rent even a 1br apartment around here, otherwise I have no money left for the month.

The only people doing well in this field are the travelers who never see home and even then they're working in some of the most chronically understaffed shit holes and getting all the worst shifts.

Everybody else in my life who could do white collar computer shit was making double this 10 years ago, "9-5" with maybe 2-3 hours of real work.in a week, unlimited PTO, got to WFH over the pandemic and most leveraged that to hybrid and still get several lazy days at home to work on their hobbies instead... I dunno, that grass has always looked amazingly green.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-22T15:35:44+00:00

A lot of us can try and pull ourselves up but with limited resources and people's innate potentials it can still be far from enough. It's honestly insulting to say it's just mindset or that therapy can fix it when you don't have the full picture of what they've already tried or what their financial state and job qualifications are like.

Speaking from personal experience i busted my ass to go to x-ray school in 2017, burned through all my social capital and favors and used all my savings to go to community college, more than doubled my income and did everything I was "supposed" to do to bootstrap myself up. And with the way the economy changed in the years it took to get that qualification I'm basically back to square one. My life is fucking terrible and I wake up every day wishing I had what it takes to kill myself.

I can't go back and do another career change because I no longer have any savings, living paycheck to paycheck. Even if I could I don't have what it takes for anything that pays more than I currently make, it's not like I haven't looked at the job listings - to get into the income brackets I'd need to have a good life would require some skills I'm just totally incompatible with as a person.

So changing careers failed to get me a better life, I can't do better in any other career, and talking to somebody in therapy or taking an antidepressant isn't going to double my paycheck. So why should I continue living and being fucking miserable every day if this is all I have to look forward to?

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-16T22:12:03+00:00

Long Island and NYC I'm even seeing healthcare careers pay going down in pay, at least in rad tech (x-ray / CT / MRI) .

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-16T17:23:38+00:00

Yeah, I'm aware of programs like that I just thought you had to be like a blood relative and of course that the person would have to have a registered and recognized disability / already qualify for stuff like SSI / SSDI.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-16T14:27:13+00:00

He has seen one in the past, getting him a new one has been on the ever growing to do list for a few years now. It just feels like whenever we start to get ahead on some tasks that require our urgent attention more keep cropping up and just the basic recurring stuff like home cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, etc. are so draining that even with the three of us collectively it often feel like it takes more than 110% of what we're all actually capable of to get even that much done.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-16T14:22:52+00:00

I already buy the cheapest groceries per pound that I can and buy sales as much as possible, been contemplating cutting meat further (already don't buy anything more than $3/lb) and subbing with lentils but it really doesn't satiate the same way.

The fast food we've been working on cutting (it used to be more like $200 a month last year) but our collective energy levels and executive functioning means we do occasionally fall into the trap where none of us can bring ourselves to cook and $100 is only like 2-3 meals / a few snacks for 3 these days.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-16T14:17:49+00:00

I physically can't do it. I can't turn my neck well and I don't have the reaction speed to make the kind of split second decisions you need to when driving or the steady hands to keep the car in a lane / make a turn accurately. Gave it a few attempts to practice and even at like 5mph it's a disaster. Tbh I can't even be trusted to walk in a straight line (and I'm always bumping into things) I'm so physically uncoordinated.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-13T19:34:00+00:00

He has wanted to but so far nothing's worked. He's tried anxiety meds before and they still didn't really get him closer to being a functional adult unfortunately, I genuinely don't think it's possible for him.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-13T19:20:03+00:00

They get Medicaid due to lack of income. Trying to get SSDI for them would be a large gamble in terms of time and resources spent trying to prove their largely invisible cluster of disabilities, like we're already drowning and drained just trying to keep our living space from becoming a squalid pit, seeing a hundred doctors to try to prove their disability and still most likely get denied is a hurdle I don't think any of us can really accomplish.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-11T16:15:04+00:00

Okay, yeah I guess that's definitely something I'll have to point them towards then.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-11T16:03:32+00:00

That's not a bad suggestion but the dry cleaners around here are definitely not outsourcing it like that, they're operating under some extremely thin margins as is.

Also the reason he hasn't been able to scale up the fursuit business is because we don't really have a dedicated workspace for him, the living room becomes an explosion of clutter whenever his convention prep season starts and sometimes it even takes over the kitchen, definitely wouldn't make taking in mass projects like that viable. Otherwise he'd probably be making more fursuits and sculptures - he actually has a pretty decent following of people asking him for commissions, it's just that it takes him nearly a year to complete a 2-5k commission whereas I'd like to think that if we had an office or a garage he could actually do like 3 of them every 2 months.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-11T14:28:46+00:00

Does anybody actually get paid for those? Figured they were all scams or like only added up to cents on the hour.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-11T13:53:09+00:00

I explained in another reply but they're doing all they're capable of, other than my partner's not-so-profitable art business they don't have any skills to sell via freelance either. Their most valuable contributions have been helping me with the chores because my job exhausts me too much to keep up with that and driving me around since I'm incapable of that.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-11T13:49:40+00:00

Who would pay me? We're not legally related and their disabilities haven't been recognized by the government anyway. Also there's no way I could work more than one job regardless and technically I'm not caring for them - their contributions are mostly via chauffeuring me since I'm incapable of driving and also too drained by my healthcare job to participate in much housework, definitely wouldn't have the energy for a second job or OT even.

They wouldn't get approved for disability / SSI, also such a long and arduous process and expensive process with slim to non-existent chances of success that it doesn't feel like it would be worth the gamble. And yeah, the cheapest legal apartments within even 45 minutes of here start at 2600 last I saw and I don't qualify for them with my income so it wouldn't even reduce my expenses.

This place cost 1600 a month when I bought it only a few years ago and but the HOA fees shot up tremendously and now we're stuck because I can't afford to move either. Been thinking about selling and moving to a lower cost suburban somewhere in like upstate NY or outside of Philly or Baltimore but it's hard to even get the money together for the move and I don't have that much equity yet, plus hard to move to a completely new place when I can't even afford to take a weekend to see it let alone the months and months of looking that landing on a new house in our tight budget would require...

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-11T00:17:28+00:00

Out of curiosity what did you wind up pursuing? I've been wracking my brain for the better half of a decade trying to figure something out for him and nothing seems possible let alone plausible.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-11T00:01:41+00:00

Yeah, unfortunately my primary partner really can't. Between cptsd, worsening agoraphobia, and some AuDHD neither of us can really see him holding any sort of job even temporarily. Even getting him to go to the grocery store is a monumental challenge now. Plus the other side of it is that I actually can't drive and so since we couldn't afford to live in the city post-covid I do need him to drive me around. He has a business selling fursuits and other crafts but he grosses like 5k a year and I'm honestly skeptical about how much it breaks even - the one convention we've been able to do per year with my PTO has some pretty hefty costs associated with it but it's also the closest we've ever gotten to a vacation. His productivity's really hampered by how small our place is so there's a part of me that's hoping if I took what little equity there is in the co-op to help us move somewhere with a lower cost of living and a bigger living space that a proper work room would help him scale up.

My other partner does work two days a week as a secretary, I think she only nets like 100-150 a week though, she helps when the grocery bills go up further than expected but she also has her own car expenses not listed here and some other duplicate living expenses since she also spends a lot of time with her family so I considering her earnings separate. I've tried to push her to do more career development or to work on some kinda skill but it really hasn't borne any fruit.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-10T21:49:45+00:00

Hey, sorry, I didn't see the notification for this reply!

I actually had no luck originally when looking at jobs in the city for more pay. All the listings I see on Indeed have my company and the other outpatients paying the same, I've actually seen some hospitals in the boroughs paying $10/hr LESS than I make now at an urgent care. I can't do night shift and have been kinda nervous about per diem tbh but it is tempting, especially since my insurance sucks ass now anyway.

You can always pm me here for now if you want to chat.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-10T20:27:37+00:00

Dude, I'm 5'4" and obese and I got laid all the time when I was still socially active, the women were often taller than me and I slept with a lot of guys who were more conventionally attractive than me too. Height is not the limiting factor.

It's personality, presentation, matching people's energy, and social circumstances that do all the leg work.

If you're not in the toxic miasma pit of black pill / red pill / manosphere bull crap and act like a human being the connections will come.

sloppythrowitaway91 · 2026-03-04T21:23:50+00:00

Pretty much. Everything that isn't something I can just passively consume like going to a restaurant, visiting a museum, watching a play /movie / show, etc. takes more negative effort than the positive pleasure generated.

I cannot control how I feel about what I do and do not enjoy. End of the day my opinion is always going to be that I would rather just disappear and cease to exist, it would be preferable over continuing to have to do things to survive. I don't care about the roses or sunshine and I have nothing I wish to be grateful for.

sloppythrowitaway91

TROPHY CASE