I've just came back to this site and need life advice, I'm working a dead end job which leaves me tired by the end of the week, I have major stress problems because I don't make enough money because even though I've been at my current job for 5 years I've had to live paycheck to paycheck and then when ever something happens (usually bad) it cascades into just more bad luck for me I am feeling like I do not matter , I feel unmotivated and when I try something and am not good at it I have a tendency to give up and I hate it because when ever I do try something I always get the thoughts "I'm not good enough" or "I'll never make something good." , the thing is I am inspired by the mediums I consume whether it be videogames, movies, books/manga/comics, animation, and music, voice acting, all these things inspire me and I want to create but I neither have the time or skill required due to me being in a low income situation and I feel like I am wasting my life away. More recently the string of misfortunes that have befallen me has brought this about is I recently returned to full duties at work after a workplace injury and I am struggling to keep up and I find it puts more stress on my mind nowadays I used to work 40hr weeks just to try to afford rent and some bills but now I've been working 25 to 36 hr weeks when I do end up working and I try to not miss too much work but just recently I missed a full 8 hour shift due to being violently ill the night before, my life isn't where I thought it would be at age 30 partially due to the pandemic and also partially due to personal misfortunes like losing a loved one earlier this year causing me grief and having to try work through it while still trying to find my own path, but over the month of October my feelings of depression, stress and fear have been growing in the back of my mind. I try my damnedest every day not to let those negative emotions get the better of me because when they do I absolutely hate the person I become due to my negativity but due to the nature of my current employment I have to hide my negative emotions and wear a mask of happiness which seems to be cracking I am starting to get at my wits end because it is very hard for me to make significant change in my life due to the fear of uncertainty that I have. I'm not even sure if I properly understand human emotions a good chunk of the time because of how distorted my perception of reality can be so I have a tendency to hide away and keep to myself, heck I do not completely know why I am even posting this feels out of character for me maybe I'm just tired of a life where I am just another cog in the machine and I know I am sick and tired of feeling alone even though I am surrounded by people , I feel like I have no choice but to let my life pass me by while I watch those around me succeed I guess what I'm trying to ask is how do I turn my life around from here at a point where I have very little means to, I feel like my life right now feels like the definition of insanity that is quoted by Vaas Montenegro in Far Cry 3 “The definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." yet I do not know how to break this cycle and when deviate from my usually habits my anxiety spikes and depending on the severity of it can cause panic attacks ranging from mild to severe where it is debilitating at my core I've always been a timid person but more and more these days I feel like I am a coward, yet when I try something it's usually because it has a small thread of hope but more often then not those threads slip through my grasp and I sink back down into my depression, sorry if this unintelligible mass of text is hard to follow my mind is a real mess right now, any advice is appreciated thank you.

I have the impression that you see your own situation incredibly well, and despite your current predicament, you appear rather coherent in thought. Anyways, I am not sure if I am in a position to be offering advice, but I will do my best to offer my perspective.

It seems to me your two most prevalent troubles can be broken down between your mental health and your financial situation. Not that your financial situation is easy to fix by any means, but I believe that it is easier for me to offer advice regarding that because mental health can vary a lot from person to person.

So starting with your financial situation, it is very possible for you to turn things around, but unfortunately it is likely going to take time, and the reason it is going to take time is not because your situation is super bad and you've messed up horribly or something. It's simply because the older you are, the more time you've had to accumulate money. It's not a great mystery that older people tend to be more wealthy, but obviously the catch is that you have to actually be able to save money to do that. And the great secret to saving money is... that you have be bringing in more money than you spend. That's it. Unfortunately or fortunately, there is no magic secret. That is going to be how the majority of people are going to have to do things if they want to save money to do things like buy a house or a car or just have more money for security. Well, easy to say, earn more than you spend, but how do you actually do that? And yes, especially in today's climate where millennials have basically been screwed over their entire life by the boomer generation, it is not an easy task to save money, but it by no means impossible. So first I'm going to talk about how we can try to save more money and then afterwards I'm going to talk about how we can try to earn more money.

So first of all start small. I'd recommend when you're starting out, try setting aside 1% of your take home income (so 1% of your paycheck after you've subtracted the cost of stuff like rent, electricity, phone, internet, etc.) every month. You put away that money and pretend you don't even have it. Unless you need it for some extreme scenario like a medical emergency, you have to promise yourself that you're not going to touch it. You can even start at less than 1% of your monthly income if you feel you need to. And if you get your paycheck more frequently than every month (like where I live paychecks are usually given biweekly), I'd recommend calculating a percentage and setting the money aside every paycheck. The more frequently you do it the easier you'll get into the habit of it. It can be even just 10 dollars every paycheck. Ideally you can set this money aside in a separate savings bank account but sometimes bank accounts do have costs. Try and see if you can get a bank account that is free or mostly free. The plan is not to really move the money around a lot so transaction fees shouldn't be the main concern. Sometimes there may be a condition where you have to have a certain amount of money in the account for it to be free otherwise they do charge a monthly fee or something like that. Either way getting a separate bank account is not imperative but it will help you a lot in terms of getting in the habit. And let me tell you even though though it may seem like its supposed to be easy when I say it, it's not. None of these individual steps are hard to do on their own, but all together its definitely not easy and it does require that you put in the effort to actually confront your finances. So don't feel bad if you feel like you have to start small. And also don't be of the mentality of, oh I'm only saving 10 dollars a month so I'll never be able to save up any significant amount. Overtime, the goal is to up your monthly contribution to your savings, but don't feel rushed to do so by any means. Only up your monthly contributions if you are absolutely sure that you can sustain it. It's all about building habits. And two, remember, your wealth scales a lot on time. Time is your best friend when it comes to wealth. I'd say that if you can get to a point where you're consistently able to set aside 5% of your income every month, that's already like ridiculously well done.

Now that's how much you want to start saving, but how do you actually find the money? Well you gotta budget ruthlessly. Write down every single expense you have. Go through every single item on your credit card statement. It is highly unlikely that you wouldn't be able to find some expense that you can reduce or cut. If you want to figure out how to accumulate money, you have to figure out where your money is going. I'm guilty of eating a lot of candy for example, and I still do, but when I started saving money, that was a good thing for me to cut back on since refined sugar that you find in most candies is not healthy for us humans in pretty much any quantity anyways. I didn't completely stop eating candy cause I like chocolate way too much, but I limited the amount. In this case I was cutting back on something I do like, but a lot of the time, when you start really going through your expenses, people often find that they're just kinda losing money here and there on random things because its so easy in our life and with credit cards to just lose money here and there without even noticing. And again, going through your credit card statement, on paper is an easy task that takes maybe around 15 minutes, but actually doing it and confronting your spending is not an easy mental task for most people when they are trying to get their finances in order. Finances are a stressful thing to think about so we procrastinate looking at our credit card spending the exact same way we procrastinate other work. Hopefully you don't have to cut down spending on things you truly love and care about. We humans need to have some enjoyment to keep going. But try and find the things you don't really care about that you might be spending money on. Like I said earlier, I do like chocolate a lot, but I also care about my health, and at the end of the day even though I like chocolate, it is not something I particularly like enough and fundamentally care about deeply when compared to my long term overall health, so I cut back on it.

Now here are some places you might be able to look to save money.

So firstly do you have friends or family that can reach out to for help? For example, if you're currently renting, is living with your parents an option? Western cultures typically are accustomed to and idea where kids move out at rather young ages which is something that is not really so common in other places and getting less common even in North American and European countries because the financial times we are living in are very different (mostly harder) than it was back during the 1980's and 1990's. It's extremely common for people to live with their parents well into their 30's in a lot of places including probably where you are living. Not even just for financial purposes but because it oftentimes just makes a lot more things convenient. Like you and your parents can split chores like cooking instead of you having to cook for yourself all the time which eats up time. It may not be an option for you but if it is, that's a great to save money right there. Or maybe you can room with a friend or two somewhere. Maybe you can share some other expenses. This is not possible for everyone but definitely worth consideration to see if you can work something out.

Another place that you may be able to save money is your phone and internet plan. At least in most English speaking countries, these plans do not have prices that are set in stone and its actually notoriously easy to call up your phone and/or internet provider and just say you want to cancel your plan with them because you found a cheaper plan elsewhere. Oftentimes they'll offer you a deal to stay with them. So poke around for other phone and internet plans and even if you can't find one cheaper than your current ones, you can still just call up your current provider or other providers and ask if they have any deals going on. Oftentimes they will try to offer you a better deal just from you calling them, either to steal you away as a customer or make sure they keep you.

If you are currently driving, is transit an option? What about biking even? If you can get your hands on a cheap bike on facebook marketplace, it may be worthwhile even biking some of the times where you may instead have driven.

That's another thing. Some things you may not necessarily want to be buying second hand, but some things are simple enough that you may feel comfortable just getting it off facebook marketplace for a cheaper price.

Okay so I've only really talked about saving money so far and I do want to discuss how we can also start earning more money, what to do with the money that you save, and also your mental health situation, but I've really got to go sleep right now I'm getting pretty tired lol. So I'll post this for now. I'm not sure if you're still around as I see that this is a few days old and hopefully you'll see it. And I'll come back to discuss the rest later.

Do be well. You may feel like you're behind in life but trust me you are not. There will be a million people behind you, a million people exactly where you are, and a million people ahead of you too. I've learned that its best to not even worry about where you are in relation to others because that doesn't change your situation at all. Although it obviously makes us feel worse if we perceive ourselves to be behind others, once you realize that your situation would be exactly the same whether or not you were behind or in front of everyone else, your begin to see your situation a bit more objectively and oftentimes begin to feel like your situation is more manageable than you may have initially felt.

Take care of yourself.

Okay so last time I talked about saving money. So I want to now talk about ways we can earn more money, but I want to talk briefly about investing. Ideally, you become familiarized with methods of investing your money because what good is all the money that you save if you can't spend it anyways? Well one is that just having money in your savings affords you a sense of security which gives you peace of mind, but two is that you can use your money to earn more money. But since people easily can lose their money in investing if they don't know what if they are doing and they are not committed to long term investing for now I'll only mention these things called "GIC's" or "Term Deposits". GIC stands for "Guaranteed Income Certificate", which basically means it is impossible to lose the money you invest in a GIC, but of course the returns are traditionally quite a bit smaller than investing in a diverse portfolio in the stock market. So with GIC, you agree to lock your money with a banking or financial institution for a set amount of time and in return you get a higher interest rate than your traditional just regular savings account. So for example, in a regular savings account, you might get something like 2% interest a year but with a GIC, if you agree that for one year, you are not allowed to withdraw the money, you can get up to maybe 5% interest. So obviously the benefit in a savings account is you can take out the money anytime you want if you think you might need it for something. Now normally I wouldn't actually recommend investing very much money into GIC's because GIC returns are typically pretty low, but since over the past year or so interest rates have been going up, right now GIC rates actually offer decently reasonable returns considering that there's no risk of you losing the money like there is in the stock market. So if you're just starting out, I'd recommend that, if you are able to start saving up little by little, GIC's are the safest way for you to start getting into the world of investing and you don't really need to know anything, as long as you understand that you will not be able to access the money you lock in until the end of your chosen duration. The longer you agree to not be able to access the money, typically you'll be rewarded with greater returns, but obviously that's a bigger commitment. Now I'm not going to offer more of my own perspective on investing unless explicitly asked because investing beyongd GIC's does yield some risk, but I do want to stress that I feel that investing is going to be an imperative step for anybody who is starting with not much to build their wealth and attain financial freedom. It is going to be incredibly difficult for someone to attain financial freedom without proper investing literacy because if you're just keeping your savings under your bed mattress, your money will naturally devalue because of inflation overtime. So you're fighting an uphill battle if you choose not to invest, and investing returns also compound significantly overtime. Investing is earning money with your money, and as you get more money from your investments, you will have more money to invest in turn, and again in turn you'll get higher rewards.

So now let's talk about earning more money. Traditionally the way to earn more money has been through education, and although today's landscape has definitely changed a lot, I would say it is still half true. But I before we even talk about considering getting more education, what are some things you can do right now? So I don't have too much to say on this front besides, never never never be loyal to your employer. Even if you say your job is a "low skilled" job, it sounds like you have a decent amount of work experience at this point which is super valuable. And despite how society views it, it is often "low skilled" jobs that are in high demand. If you see someplace else that is offering a higher wage, don't feel bad for jumping ship. Your employer is not your family or your friend, they are there to make business decisions. And don't be afraid of asking for a raise. If somewhere else is offering a better wage and you don't want to jump ship right away, be open with your boss. Tell them that you are looking for better pay and that you are considering leaving if somewhere else is going to pay you more. Now obviously there may be other considerations such as location and proximity to where you live, but the bottom line is you should never feel loyal to your company. You and your company have a transnational relationship. You provide your services and they pay you. Too often I see people getting underpaid because they feel some kind of attachment to their employer.

So now to talk about the possibility of getting more education. I don't know if getting further education is an option for you, and obviously that costs money too. But further education doesn't have to be college classes. A lot of tradeskills are in demand actually so things like carpentry, plumbing, electricians, and such. Trade schools are typically going to be cheaper than going to a formal college, and there is typically rather ample work oppurtunity for people working through trade school apprenticeships. Now I don't think formal college is bad, but a lot of studies are not likely to be worth the financial costs. Unfortunately, most of the areas that you've expressed interests in which are more arts focused studies, are going to be rather difficult to build a strong financial career around. Certainly not impossible, but you're opting to fight a harder battle, and its just the reality that historically and as of today, arts jobs are not as in demand and can be rather feast or famine. If you make it big you'll be in a great spot. But most people, even those who do eventually make it, have to struggle for along time. So just looking at things practically, you may have to consider settling to aim for a career that might not be your number one interest and set aside your interests as a hobby that you can work on in your personal time. Now if you're going to college to study something like computer science or engineering or something within the medical field, those are going to have ample work oppurtunities that pay decently well if you are able to complete the degree. But as a sort of sidenote, I would not recommend a career in an engineering or medical field unless you have express interest in doing so. Oftentimes people find that the amount of work needed to complete those degrees is much more than its really worth.

But the obvious problem is how are you going to pay for more education? Well there's no good answer to this besides just trying to save up for it overtime if you decide that this is something you think is worth trying. First of all, the first thing to consider is what kind of college you'll be going to. A big university is going to cost you a lot more than a community college, and for certain fields, having gone to a big university does look good on your resume. But I'd say for a field like computer science, the job is so in demand that, yes you may land a better job having gone to a more prestigious school, but you're likely still going to be able land a decently comfortable job having gotten your education from a community college. So in short, don't think that more education only includes going to university. Consider a community college or trade school as I mentioned earlier instead of a big university and weigh the pros and cons for yourself. The second thing to discuss is taking out a loan to pay for education. Now this somewhat depends on where you live. If you live in America, student loans are incredibly predatory. It seems that President Biden is making some effort to forgive some amount of student loans, but it's not entirely safe to bet on taking out a bunch of loans hoping that in the future it may be forgiven. But if you can take out a loan that has little to no interest on it, it is worth considering if you are actually going into a field that is in high demand like tech or trade skills. However I do not think it is worth taking out a loan to study something such as literature or philosophy.

So that I think is all I have to say on this topic for now. I do want to discuss your current mental health situation as well but I'm going to have to depart for now again.

Once again, take care of yourself.

Thanks for all the advice Kon things have been getting better little by little since my initial post and I have been looking at potential new employment opportunities and though president Biden is helming that initiative I doubt prime minister Trudeau will follow his lead and do the same for Canada as president Biden is doing for the states, once again thanks for all the advice and I will try to take better care of myself

Hi Solaris,

Not sure if you’re still around here, but I wanted to add something that Kon didn’t cover: your passion for movies, and games and manga. I’ve always loved to write—in high school, I wrote all sorts of stories. But I ended up in a field that didn’t satisfy my creativity or my passion, and I felt like I should be doing something that I love. So I recently decided to write a book. I’m currently working full time and managing all sorts of other responsibilities, but I decided to write it page by page. I realized that I was just having fun writing, even if it was only for 15 minutes a couple times a week. And slowly, I started to figure out my story. It doesn’t matter if no one reads my book. It doesn’t matter if my book is bad. As long as I have fun writing it, it is successful.

Now, I’m not suggesting you write a book (unless you want to). But in most societies, like Canada, we think that we need to be “good” or “talented” to do art. We’re supposed to “put time into it” and finish a project “successfully”. I just wanted to tell you that it’s not true. You have every right to do art, or voice acting, or writing, or whatever passion you have, just because you like it.

And who knows? Maybe after 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there, you’ll end up with a book, or a manga, or a song, written entirely by you!

Thanks Cerulean for that piece of advice and those encouraging words, I will keep them in mind whenever I attempt to do what it is I ever I feel like creating, I hope you and Kon see these updates and have a good holiday season wherever you may be and once again thank you