Chronic Grief, Low Reward, and the Value Proposition of Life

[Wizardry]

Everybody experiences adversity in their lives. No one ends up dying of old age without knowing pain and hardship. Most people seem to have at least something in their lives that brings them enough joy and contentment that life is worth living in spite of the pain and hardship that is an inherent part of existence.

When someone is experiencing intense suffering that seems like it'll never end, and they don't have anything that brings them enough joy or contentment to make life worth living in spite of that ongoing suffering, the value proposition of life collapses. If significant enough joy or contentment to make the value proposition of life coherent is not achievable for this individual, they may have nothing significant to look forward to except the day they no longer exist.

To be honest, I hate living in this world under these circumstances. I've experienced extreme anguish, discontentment, despair and psychogical torture in ways I don't expect anyone else to ever truly understand, all while having nothing to make it all worthwhile. I've experienced kinds of personal tragedies and trauma that no one else would even believe, let alone be able to empathise with. The one thing that I've always wanted from life has been kept out of my reach in ways that feel cruelly contrived, and most people don't have to miss out on it like I have, so I'm an outlier in an incredibly upsetting way.

People tend to not want to accept this reality (and I understand why, but it is the reality nonetheless), but for my life, finally getting to have a committed, compatible romantic partner would make all the difference between life being something to be endured vs life being something to be enjoyed. I've had to put up with romantic deprivation, the resulting ongoing unresolvable grief, triggering normative reminders of what I'm missing out on, narrowing reward pathways and being misunderstood by others for far, far too long. A romantic relationship with a compatible woman is the only thing that could resolve some of my grief, bring me enough joy and contentment to be enthused about life and bring my other reward pathways back online. I'm kind of like a male sleeping beauty.

As it stands, I don't really feel anything for anyone. My mother is the closest relationship I have, and even there I have mixed feelings. She prioritised keeping me safe in childhood and modelling virtuous values, but she completely failed at preparing me for adult life, helping me develop the skills I needed or focusing on my future and future needs. I developed amblyopia/strabismus (lazy eye) as a young child. The optometrist told us that I needed to wear an eyepatch on my good eye in order for my bad eye to develop properly. My mother would sometimes randomly ask me to wear the eyepatch while I was watching TV, which of course being a young child who couldn't fully grasp the consequences of not doing so, I declined. When I declined, she wasn't insistent, she would just give up. I ended up aging past the developmental window without wearing the eyepatch anywhere near enough. I am legally blind in my bad eye today, all because my mother was not insistent enough that I wear that eyepatch. My mum can offer emotional support at times, but when the stakes are high and I need more than emotional support, I'm on my own. That's pretty much the way it's always been.

My father didn't enter the picture until I was in my mid teens. I specifically asked him about girls multiple times and told him I was struggling, and all he had was one-sentence responses for me. Either he didn't care enough to help me, or he actually didn't have any advice to give me. When I realised that my life has very likely been significantly more difficult and less rewarding as a result of not having an invested male role-model while growing up, I cut what little contact I had with my father off and told him exactly what I thought of him. I don't respect him as a father, and there is nothing he can do for me now.

My life has effectively been shaped by absence. Absence of parental scaffolding and guidance. Father/male role-model absence during childhood. Absence of romantic relationships. Absence of adequate help and support for my difficulties. And now, absence of anything that could offer contentment or make me feel alive except one thing that I don't have full control over getting, and where I experience compounding disadvantages as it relates to getting it.

Now, I spend the bulk of my free time in bed alternating between scrolling on social media, perusing forums and watching youtube videos. It seems that nothing I can do is going to actually get me what I want, so minimal reward begets minimal effort. I've put on a lot of weight such that I don't feel confident with my body, so I've tried to cut down on the sugar, but it hasn't been sustainable. I'm addicted to UberEats because I don't have the experience or frankly the motivation to cook, and sugar is one of my very few reliable sources of reward. It doesn't help that I live with my mum and she doesn't cook either and also just orders UberEats for meals. I resent that what has been modelled for me by my mother is staying home, ordering food and smoking a lot of weed (which I can't even do myself anymore due to something horrible that happened to me). It's really frustrating that all of the behavioural modelling that I've been given from my mother consists of is bad habits that need to be overcome and don't contribute positively to my life in any way, all while the only thing that is s central motivator/grief alleviator appears like it will remain out of reach for the forseeable future no matter what I do.

I don't know what I'm expecting from this post. The likelihood that I'll receive applicable life-changing advice is low. Hopefully at the very least people understand and appreciate where I'm coming from.

 

[monkeyclogs]

it sounds like you are struggling with depression. you probably already know this but I just wanted to say I read and understood.

Sometimes it can feel like you have no future but you always have agency. my only advice is to do something new today, however small and seemingly insignificant. it makes a bigger difference than you would imagine.

 

[Wizardry]

it sounds like you are struggling with depression.

It's not depression, it's grief. They can seem quite similar in some ways, but the causes are very different. The distinction is important, because treatments and approaches that typically work for depression don't touch what I'm going through.

Depression generally involves a malfunction in perception or a chemical imbalance. Those things are not the driving force here.

I'll quote my post from another thread that clearly explains why what I'm dealing with is a grief state.

This is a take that I think a lot of people aren't ready to hear yet, but for some people, permanent romantic absence manifests not as depression, not as entitlement, and not merely as longing, but as chronic grief. It's not just the absence of a positive, but the presence of a negative.

Grief is often defined as coming from loss or bereavement, but that is only the most visible and socially validated way that a grief state can occur. Relational grief is not fundamentally about loss. It is about the sustained absence of an expected, meaningful relationship or role. People experience childless/infertility grief when they really want children but aren't able to have them. People who grow up without a father can retrospectively grieve a paternal figure when they realise the developmental cost of fatherlessness. Some people grieve not being able to experience being and having a romantic partner when the desire for that kind of relationship is salient and there's no grounding reason to expect it's going to happen.

We acknowledge that spousal bereavement is emotionally difficult because a spouse is an important part of their partner's life. We validate break-up grief as being real because the benefits of being in a relationship and an imagined future with a significant other were lost. If romance was really as trivial and substitutable as some people like to pretend when confronted with someone experiencing permanent romantic absence, losing a partner should be as trivial as never getting to have one, but nobody thinks about it that way because getting to experience romantic relationships is important for most people.

The logic being used is like saying a rich person who becomes poor feels economically disenfranchised, but a person who's been poor their whole life doesn't feel that way, never did, and wouldn't be validated if they claimed they ever felt that way. Loss-based grief makes it so that somebody with a higher emotional baseline falls to a lower emotional baseline. Absence-based grief often results in a stably low emotional baseline, so it's less visible and commonly minimised.

People who are asking you to accept not having a romantic partner are unknowingly asking you to embrace grief as your permanent emotional baseline. Acceptance-based framing in the context of bereavement is only humane because there is no intervention that can revive the dead, so acceptance is tragically necessary. In the case of grief based on romantic absence, it may be difficult, but there is a way to resolve that grief, so acceptance-based prescriptions are lazy and unethical.

No offence, but this appears to be exactly the kind of misunderstanding my problems that I was referring to in my post. I don't blame you though. It's common for people to think this sort of thing is depression.