This is a pointless life

[inuet]

No enjoyment, no socialising, FB groups full of Coronaqueens telling people to "stay safe" and "it's ok to.find it hard, it is hard".
British government and the Daily Mail brigade utterly useless and now celebrating end of freedom of movement. Months more of not being able to do anything just getting more and more pissed off. My local community has turned into a vipers nest of curtain twitchers and sanctimonious busybodies. The longer this goes on the more life lost and the more pointless it seems carrying on when life is just an endless load of crap.

I'm not going to turn into some cake-baking Pollyanna just because that's what this new emotional fascism dictates

OP, you’re writing my script, emotional fascism is bang on.

Suffering is relative, there will always be someone who “has it worse” and this is an anonymous Internet forum, perfect for blowing off steam at a time of year the emotional dial is normally off the scale anyway, never mind mid pandemic/on the eve of a lockdown (I’m in scotland).

When I'm happy I'm happy and when I'm unhappy I'm unhappy

When you're unhappy, do you do anything to make yourself unhappy, or do you just sit about complaining about how shit life is?

*to make yourself happy

Kodak that was a great post. I didn't know Scotland was about to be locked down again. I guess most places will be fairly soon anyway.

[quote OverTheRubicon]@fortunatelynot surely if we were all about consumerism, people would be more resigned to staying home with Amazon available. It's precisely because people are attached to other people, or to maintaining their income and sanity, that this is so hard for some.

700,000 new people are going to be pushed into poverty by covid. They don't lack resilience, they lack funds. Others have lost loved ones, lost healthcare, lived alone for months on end. Have some fucking empathy.[/quote]
This is true. People can't be both shallow consumerists with no deeper feelings and Covid rule-breakers - because most Covid rule breaking is driven by a desire to see and connect with beloved family and friends. Sometimes this is ill-considered in light of the risks, but I find it very hard to condemn it from a moral point of view.

There is an element of choice in feeling happy or unhappy,
It is not completely out of your control. If you disagree with this, you have a core feeling of helplessness. This is closely linked to a victim mentality.

I’m not referring to clinical depression here by the way but most people have choices in how they respond to adversity in their lives. It’s not a popular opinion as it means people have to take responsibility for their feelings.

Yes it’s shit, I think we can all agree on that, but pointless? No, absolutely not.

Some people must feel helpless to change their outlook and their emotional response. There will always be shit times in life. You have choice in how you respond to it. It has nothing to do with loving lockdown - no one loves lockdown. But why chose to sit still and nurture your misery? There are other options.

I agree with the pp who mentions victim mentality. It's so self defeating. Poor me poor me its shit I have nothing.

Why would you play that tune over and over?

Forgot to add, I’ve had dark moments this year, like the rest of the world I’m sure. I accept my feelings and fully feel them. Sit with them, etc.
I don’t CHOOSE to wallow in them though, and that’s the key difference.

Validate your feelings by all means, you are more than entitled to them. Denying them and lying to yourself is toxic positivity, but there comes a point when you are wallowing. The latter being a choice.

@GalesThisMorning

I agree with the pp who mentions victim mentality. It's so self defeating. Poor me poor me its shit I have nothing.

Why would you play that tune over and over?

It's called despair, and in some cases depression. When the big things in life seem utterly shit it can be hard to 'find joy in the small things' because they aren't anywhere near comparable.

It'd be like telling someone who just had £1000 stolen from their wallet to find hot in finding £1 on the street

Yes it is called depression. I've suffered from it and its hard. You have to actively challenge those thought patterns though or it gets worse.

@GalesThisMorning

Yes it is called depression. I've suffered from it and its hard. You have to actively challenge those thought patterns though or it gets worse.

At what point does the "sitting with" u happiness become a choice to be depressed? How do you measure that? Also while I would agree that 99% of people don't love lockdown, I maintain the number of those who do is not zero. There are people who will have actively enjoyed criticising and belittling on this thread. There were threads dedicated to calling out those who enjoyed the feeling of superiority during Lockdown 1 to the extent that they publically castigated people for doing things that were not even transgressions. There are people who want others to be deprived of liberty and being deprived of their own is in their minds a price worth paying for that. There aren't many but there aren't none either

At what point does the "sitting with" u happiness become a choice to be depressed

At the point where you complain there is no point, and have no plans to help yourself feel happier.

Some people must feel helpless to change their outlook and their emotional response. There will always be shit times in life. You have choice in how you respond to it. It has nothing to do with loving lockdown - no one loves lockdown. But why chose to sit still and nurture your misery? There are other options

I am always the optimist and can make the best of most situations. We all lost our jobs/sources of income in this family in March

Between our family and our extended family we are all now claiming UC.
We all picked up different work just to keep going. Days here and there.

Dd who is a qualified teacher in an ECA which has stopped even picked up work as a temp TA as she thought even if there are other lockdowns she could still get work in schools. Even that work is going.

Whilst some people might be depressed because of Covid I think a lot of that depression comes from fear.

Not necessarily fear of the disease but fear of losing everything.

We as a family in the last 5 years have been battered by a cancer diagnosis and Covid. Dp who is the one who had cancer and doesn’t have a spleen is more worried about his financial future rather than his physical health.

Telling someone to look on the bright side when there isn’t a bright side is no good.

Telling someone that the bright side is they are healthy when they have lost everything else and will never regain what they have lost and don’t want to be here anymore is missing the point spectacularly

@Oliversmumsarmy

It’s shit for everyone. Everyone

Judging by some of the posts on the Coronavirus forum I would argue it isn’t shit for everyone.

Loads of people are loving it.
Loads of people want more of the same
Loads of people are not looking forward to getting back to normal.

I was pointing out that governments around the world now know how far they can go with taking away their citizens civil liberties and people not complaining and blindly complying.
In China no one complained when they were welding families into their apartments with no food. Certain countries made their citizens think that if someone was not wearing a mask people were perfectly entitled to verbally attack them in the street.

Somehow I don’t think we can be pushed that far. We have worn masks and locked down and now for a lot of people, we are fed up and are just doing our own version of lockdown

You surely can't compare China (a totalitarian state that enforces complete subservience to authority), to what we have in UK! That's ridiculous and is quite frankly quite irresponsible to peddle that sort of notion on here, where people are already anxious and at a very low ebb, especially when you don't have any tangible facts to support it.

Whilst in general there has been a lot of sacrifice made by the majority of people in this country, there are still a huge amount of people thumbing their nose at the guidance and determined to "live their life". You only have to look at the relative freedoms still afforded people, even during lockdown and Tier 4, with the Government balancing the ability for people to earn a living and still trying to control the spread of this highly infectious disease, to know we are absolutely nowhere near having our freedom taken away. Hence why lockdown 2 did nothing to control the spread.

"Our version of lockdown" = people going back to life as normal, i.e. as it was before Coronavirus pandemic - even though infection rates continue to rise exponentially!

@inuet - I think sitting with unhappiness edges into depression when nothing brings you a spark of joy, when getting out of bed seems too hard, when you are numb, when you sit on the floor in the shower because you don't have energy to stand, when you really think suicide is a reasonable plan, when you can't brush your teeth, when you can't stop crying.

If this is you you should get help. Tablets help lift the fog. There is still joy in life and being able to appreciate the joy of just being outside on a nice day is liberating. It might sound trite but if you can get to the point of gratitude for what you do have you will be more content, and that's usually what we all want. Let happiness go if it's too hard and aim for contentment.

@Oliversmumsarmy

We as a family in the last 5 years have been battered by a cancer diagnosis and Covid. Dp who is the one who had cancer and doesn’t have a spleen is more worried about his financial future rather than his physical health.

What you and your family have been through is devastating and worlds apart from people who say they're fed up because they can't travel, or can't meet up with their friends, or aren't able to work in the office etc. Those are temporary losses that will be restored when the vaccine has been rolled out across U.K.

Hence why people are suggesting that there needs to be some perspective about what people have temporarily "lost".

Rosie According to his twitter account, Captain Tom is in Barbados with his family at the moment. So that's what he's doing in lockdown 😁

@ShiteheadRevisited

I'm completely with you, OP. It's all shit.

The whole objective of life now appears to be to avoid death, and in my opinion this is not living.

I have a gaping hole where my friends and travel once were - privileged? Yes, probably. I do acknowledge that, but it doesn't make it all any less shite.

to you all.

exactly this , whats the point of living if its just an existing for the bloody sake of it . at the end of the day ,its affecting everybody one way or another . op has asked if anybody ever stops judging ? , no they fucking dont in my opinion , there are plenty of sanctamonious tossers out there and never more so than now . the bottom line is we feel how we feel about it and nobody can take that away from you

@Eckhart

When I'm happy I'm happy and when I'm unhappy I'm unhappy

When you're unhappy, do you do anything to make yourself unhappy, or do you just sit about complaining about how shit life is?

its affecting everybody in different ways , maybe op feels too shit to have the strength to make herself feel any different right now . she feels how she feels , and nobody can take that away from her , why cant she sodding well complain about it without getting made to feel how ungrateful she is about life , how hard other people have it blah blah blah

I'm struggling too OP. I've been through a lot in my 52 years so I don't think it's a lack of resilience. Every bit government announcement has triggered a depressive episode.

@unchienandalusia

I'll tell you what I'm fed up with, the utter lack of resilience and stoicism in the world. Many many people for thousands of years have had it much worse. Pull your big girl pants up and count your blessings.

We've been so privileged for so long in the first world that we're not used to hardships as a society.

The first half of the last century we had two world wars, the great depression and rationing. Imagine living through that like our grandparents or great grandparents did. Staying in and watching telly for a while doesn't compare.

@chaosrabbitland

why cant she sodding well complain about it without getting made to feel how ungrateful she is about life

She is entitled to her feelings, and to post about them. Just as everybody else is entitled to their feelings and entitle to post them. I was asking OP a question. Is that alright with you? Or are you the only one who's allowed to 'sodding well' speak?

Quite @Eckhart

Anyone who posts about resilience, gratitude or positivity is ignored by the OP, as she thinks it’s a load of “drivel” (her words).

Ironic really invalidating other peoples opinions like that, when she holds on to her own quite firmly.

Anyone who disagrees with the OP’s narrative is an “emotional fascist”.

It is shit OP, but It will pass and it will improve but not for a year at least. I don't think we will ever get back to any sort of normal but anything has to be better than what we have now. I work in mental health and my caseload has doubled - I'm not clinical but dealing with the tsunami of mental health issues in others is taking it's toll on me after nearly 20 years and I'm not sure I'm prepared for what's to come.

My mum is dying of cancer and I'm barely able to see my grandkids and I'm worried about what the future holds for the little ones.

The loss of travel isn't something that affects me as I haven't had a proper holiday in years due to caring for my dad who died earlier this year and now my mum.

I hope you start to find some joy somewhere OP, but that is down to you to try.