Change

As of late, life has felt… boring, for lack of a better word.

It’s not necessarily that I’m bored; I have plenty of things to do, but… life doesn’t feel like it has anything worth working for.

My parents have been telling me to get a job for years, even while I was still in High School EX college. While I only feel marginally closer to that goal now, I, unfortunately, still don’t really have much of a personal desire to get a job. No amount of money or the things that it could get me could drive me to actively try to get a job that doesn’t even seem to exist in today’s job market. I trust that they just want me to be well-off in this country, but it still doesn’t drive me to earnestly try, even if I try to for their sake.

Recently, Google has announced plans to basically lock down Android in the name of security by making it so that you can only install apps made by developers that Google verifies. It was thanks to this that, for once, I seriously considered switching to iOS. Why? Because those changes would have basically turned Android into that same operating system, but under a company that likely cares less for your privacy. Even now that they’ve announced that they’ll have an “advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified”, an iPhone as my next phone is still looking appealing. It doesn’t feel worth trying to be personally invested in a device whose designers clearly don’t want you to make it your own.

And for bonus points, hearing and seeing political news, especially in the U.S., only exacerbates this feeling even more. I don’t even look for political news; the Invidious instance that I frequent has the popular feed set as the home page (though that’s more on me; I could always change it on my end and set a cookie), and my sister will often times bring political news that she sees in her own feeds to me (nothing against her by any means; I’m sure she’s just trying to vent her frustration).

All of these things have had me feeling pretty down as of late, save for when I’m playing Persona 5 Royal or working on some other personal projects of mine. It’s getting to the point where I’ve actually started wondering if I’m struggling with depression again. Especially before I started writing this last night, as I was feeling down again, but I was having a hard time tracing it back to anything. However, I think I have more of a theory as to why I’ve been feeling so down as of late, as well as what may have been hindering me all these years.

Relationships

I often go down what I call “mental rabbit holes” in my mind, which are typically scenarios that I walk through despite me reminding myself that they very, very likely won’t happen. As much as I hate to admit it, they repeatedly revolve around romance. Not viewed through rose-tinted glasses, but, ironically enough, through the lightning and flashes of fear, of all things. As creepy as it may sound, relationships are quite fascinating to watch from afar. I’ve come to understand them as two people deciding that they’re going to stick together through this hell of a rollercoaster that we make light of by just calling it “life”. Put another way, they’re life partners. It’s this and the small moments of affection that they show one another that never fail to make me smile. So, if that’s the way I see them, then how could I experience fear during these types of mental rabbit holes?

Notice how I referred to people in these relationships as life partners. Not “partners for this project”, not “partners for a time”, life partners. It means that they stay together for the rest of their lives. The problem with this, though, is that, as living beings, we all have this special ability that, though others can attempt to snuff it out, can never be killed: it is the ability to choose, the ability to make choices; it is ｢free will｣. With this ability, we can choose to stay in these life partnerships, and we can choose to love our partners. However, with this ability, we can also choose to act in ways that harm our partners, harm those who depend on us, or we can ultimately decide that we don’t want to continue in this relationship anymore. That is, we can choose to change.

A singular constant

They (whoever “they” is) say that the only constant in this world is change. The only thing that will ever stay the same is that things will change.

For most of my childhood, my parents have been divorced. Eventually, my siblings and I were doing the whole split custody shenanigans, spending some time with our mom and some time with our dad for at least 8 years of my life. Split custody solves the issue of making sure that both parents who can’t peaceably live together can still spend time with their kids, but it solves this problem at the cost of stability. The children will never really be able to truly settle down as they move back and forth between places. Even if it’s between two places that always stay the same, the environment never remains stable (this is based on my own experiences; I haven’t done my research, but every child is different, and the effects may also be different).

So, the constant back and forth, combined with other factors in one parent’s house over the other, led me to learn, on a very low level, that everything can, and often will, change. As contradictory as this may sound, that doesn’t produce an adult ready to take on a constantly changing world; it produces a child still holding on to what little stability they have left. This doesn’t even take into consideration the undiagnosed autism I was dealing with.

Fear of the singular constant

My own internal fear of change is something that has crossed my mind before, but it is only now that I’ve come to realize just how much it has affected me.

With Google seeking to change who can make apps that people can use, even if it’s in the name of “security”, the biggest reason for me to stay on Android was under the threat of changing. So, my solution was to simply move to a system that would mainly be the same with better privacy and just stop investing myself into the device.

Hearing about political news both here in the U.S. and in various other countries causes me to feel like things are constantly changing. Constantly seeing change happen, I find myself fearing that the world is on the verge of a major change that will rock the entire world to its core. Every single piece of political news causes just a small change that often doesn’t impact me directly, but it does make me fear what could be next.

A job doesn’t interest me because, in my mind, I have to somehow manage to appeal to the employer’s desires for an employee in order to get the job. On top of that, even if I manage to climb that ever-rising peak, then I’m left at the mercy of my employer for my well-being. I think the recent tech industry layoffs with the advent of generative AI are proof enough of this fact. Of course, I could attempt to make sure that I’m always employed by staying up to date with the newest technologies, but I don’t want to deal with a rat race that continues to grow at hyper-exponential speeds. Even if I were to get hired at some company making lots of money like my parents want me to, I would likely live in fear that I could simply not make the cut when they start laying people off. In other words, I would constantly fear that things would simply change, and I wouldn’t be able to change fast enough to keep up.

A relationship, while fascinating and beautiful to me, doesn’t interest me because of my constant fear that she could change. I would fear that she could suddenly become disinterested in me, or possibly worse, that she starts to choose to stay with me out of obligation rather than because she enjoys staying with me. What may be even worse is that the same thing could happen to me, too. I could change to her detriment, making me feel horrible and guilty for something that I would constantly fight, possibly in vain, to rectify. Either way, I would constantly fear that she could change and either choose to leave or stay with me in a prison of her own making, or that I could change and do either of the same things…

A bit of a tangent, but my dad has repeatedly given me some advice concerning looking for a wife, based on the advice that a pastor gave in a book on the subject: that you go on up to 3 dates with her, and it’s by the third one that you decide whether you’ll date her (or something like that). I’ve always hated this piece of advice. At first, I understood my disdain for it to come from the fact that it felt like just too little time to decide on something like that. You’d think that whoever gave the advice was going for a speedrunning record (nothing against the pastor, by the way). But now, I have a different understanding of the issue: 3 dates feels like too little time because it’s not enough time for me to strengthen my faith in her so that I can come to believe that she won’t change and that she actually wants to be with me. If I should go through 4 seasons before getting married to her, then scratch that; I need somewhere around 40.

A significant other leaving, being laid off from a job, a major change in the world, or Google wanting to change Android. In my stability-craving mind, the possibility of one of those things happening makes me fear that my fragile understanding of reality itself will be upended. An event as catastrophic as the earth itself suddenly exploding, leaving me suspended in space attempting to live in a space that’s not my own (that is, if I survive the explosion). I don’t want to invest time and energy into something that I’ve learned will simply fall apart at some point in the future, so I just… don’t really work towards anything at all. At best, I explore ideas, I float around the web, and I watch the world change from my mental faux shelter. All while everyone attempts to convince me to come out and play a game where the meta changes once a millisecond.

So… what do I do?

To be honest, I’m not really sure. All of this is just a theory as to why I haven’t felt motivated to do all of these things that everyone around me seems so eager to do.

Of course, I could “just deal with it”, but that only seems effective in a Saw movie where you’re basically guaranteed to get cut, injured, or killed. A better solution may just be to just have more faith in people that they won’t change on me, though that seems pretty vague.

Either way, I’m not really sure what I could really do, but I at least feel closer to the source of the problem.