My rapid descent into insanity and unproductivity

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Warning: This is a very complicated, long thread that I initially intended to post in work/finding a job subforum...

I'm sure this is going to sound understandably ridiculous to some of you guys, but I have never had a job for more than a month and I've only had three of those sorts of jobs that I held down for a month each. I'm 24 years old. The reason I left the first one was because it was a door to door sales job where you get worked from 9am to 9pm Monday-Saturday making only commission. More or less, it was a scam where you waste a bunch of gas and run down your car. The second job was basically a data entry job that got outsourced after a month of employment. The third job was after school teaching that was ruined by one of the most chaotic, incompetent organizational structures I have ever been involved in. I'm pretty sure the founder of the non-profit came into work stoned every day. Also, I never ended up getting paid or trained in any useful way. It was totally embarrassing working there as their lesson plans were mostly improvised on the spot by all the teachers 5 minutes before the lesson. I had one interview at a very successful auditing company and another interview at a cognitive testing developer, but alas, nothing came out of these interviews. I had other interviews offered by companies that were located about an hour and a half away from where I live, but since I do not have the money to move out to those cities, I can't take any of those jobs.

I feel like the only reason the two aforementioned companies I really wanted to work at even entertained the possibility of employing me was because I graduated Cum Laude (3.69 overall GPA; 3.86 major GPA) from a well respected university, worked in a complex sounding psycholinguistics lab, and performed independent research. Unfortunately, these are the only work relevant accomplishments I can put on my resume. The reason the two companies I actually wanted to work at didn't hire me was most likely due to complete lack of experience.

After the second job, because apparently nobody was interested in hiring a somewhat recent graduate (Fall '09), I began working on an MS in Speech Language Pathology (SLP), so there was no time for anything besides studying. In addition to the field being quite lucrative, the main reason I attempted to enter the field of Speech Language Pathology was because I thought there was going to be a direct relationship between the field of cognitive science (what I studied in undergrad and found completely fascinating) and SLP. Unfortunately, the SLP courses ended up being completely unrelated to anything I could find myself becoming interested in. Therefore, after a semester of this, I dropped out of the program this past December. This leaves me where I'm at now (intense depression, heh).

Deciding to listen to my heart for once instead of logic and my parents, I recently applied for three PhD programs in cognitive science. I'm doing this full well knowing how difficult it is to get an academic appointment after finishing one of these sorts of programs, but I'm hoping the economy is better after the 5 years it takes me to complete the program. However, the odds of getting accepted are probably not as good as I'd like due to mediocre GRE scores. This score was even after studying for a few weeks (although I did raise my combined score a good 460 points). I also performed very poorly in the SLP courses I took last fall due to my father dying unexpectedly during the beginning of the semester and there. Right after that, my abusive, borderline personality disordered girlfriend at the time broke up with me (this was a good thing in the long run, but it hurt me significantly then and still hurts me now for reasons unknown). Getting back to PhD program admission, I do have excellent recommendation letters (one from a renowned linguistics professor that has done work with Noam Chomsky), a great senior thesis/independent research, and a good graduating GPA to my credit, though.

I keep hearing of friends who performed poorly in college relative to me getting these cool jobs and moving into the city. They're beginning their lives, whereas I feel like I've regressed in my life. I'm living like a damn teenager. I live in my mom's house, have no job, have jack for money, share a busted car with my little brother, smoke cigarettes and drink with local college students on weekends (experimenting with drugs I regret like MDMA/ecstasy [how I got this for almost free the two times I've done it I have no idea]), and date girls that are 5 years younger than me. During this winter break, I've been smoking marijuana and drinking with friends probably 4/7 days a week. I hate this, I don't feel like myself anymore. The lows I've experienced these last 6 months have been lower than any lows I've experienced in my life. This morning I woke up wishing I had stayed asleep for one of the first times in my life. The anti-depressants don't do anything for me except numb my OCD and maybe prevent me from being completely sad the entire time. I've been on prozac for 11 years. I briefly went off of it for 8 months during 2010.

I feel like I can't handle the pressure of having a social life where I interact with these edgy, party folks. I need to drop them out of my life before I capsize, but then I fear I'll have nobody to hang out with anymore. Neither will I have any women in my life. The person I was between 2004-2009 (undergrad years) wouldn't care about having friends or getting with girls. All he wanted to do was read about theories of cognition, hang out with a friend or two every now and then and talk almost entirely research. That guy was almost totally terrified of women and would evade any romantic attempts by women.

After graduating I had a lot of time on my hands, because after applying to about 60 jobs throughout the course of 2010 (probably 1/4 of these were food service jobs like catering/waiting), I got nothing, so my mind started to wander elsewhere. I realized that I had never connected with a woman in my life and wanted to explore that. So, I learned to desensitize myself towards large groups of people, strangers, and 'not knowing what to say' when talking to girls. This was cool and all, but I ended up meeting almost entirely party girls. I ended up having sex with almost a dozen women in a year that I met pretty much randomly. Went on tons of dates and got lots of kisses, haha. I even ended up scoring an extremely attractive, model looking girlfriend (now ex girlfriend) with borderline personality disorder that pretty much tore down my psyche. As a result of this behavior in the last year, I knowingly hold this almost definitely false belief that all attractive women between the ages of 18-26 go out and drink on weekends and love partying.

As I'm sure a few of you guessed, what led to this lifestyle was reading pick-up artist material (I don't really use any lines besides ones I've made up myself). I feel like a very, very small portion of the information these "dating gurus" give you is useful, the rest is garbage. What is true, though, is that if you approach large numbers of women, you will learn a lot on your own and start to figure out where you stand in the mating game after even just 50 approaches (I probably did a couple hundred total this year, lol). It's not what you think it is. Having sex with attractive women can be done even if you're an skinny, out of shape dork like myself (you wouldn't believe how attractive a few of the girls I got with in the last year are). Everything has to do with her self-esteem and how good of an actor you are (yes, this is really, really messed up). I got like 20 girl's numbers last semester, probably around 40 in the last year. I obviously was getting a lot of these numbers simply because I could, not because I wanted to date them. I wouldn't have sex with a 1/3 of them probably. Ironically, though, I did end up having sex with a few girls, especially after I broke up with my ex, I was not attracted to simply to quell my loneliness.

I could structure my entire life around hooking up with really hot girls, but that's so god damn fake and ridiculous that I can't even fathom it. Unfortunately, it's what I have been subconsciously doing constantly now that I know how to play the numbers game (this takes a lot of time and emotional energy whether you want to admit it or not).

Consciously, though, I want to abandon this lifestyle entirely. This is the most unhappy/unproductive state I have been in my entire life (don't you always feel like the latter unhappy states are worse than the former??) and becoming sociable is hands down what created it. Before this, I was basically on the path towards becoming an academic and I still could very easily reverse and return to that. There was one time last semester that I came very close to clearing my phone's address book.

Anyways, I see the problems in my life as two-pronged:

1. This PUA lifestyle of partying (and the drugs/alcohol it entails) and meeting tons of women (I do NOT get the ones I actually want and can envision myself having a stable, healthy relationship with).

2. Living at my parent's house in the middle of nowhere, having no job, and sharing a car with my brother.

The former can be taken care of easily by avoiding all of these people entirely (unfortunately, this includes all of my close friends except one or two). There will be an ensuing loneliness and I can see two of these guys being a bit hurt that I totally cut off all contact with them, but I will develop a nice shell to this loneliness again and crawl back into the deeper, more profound recesses of my mind as a result. I want to be that guy nobody knows who is painfully awkward at interacting with people again. That guy had a life. Unfortunately, now I crave social interaction instead of being scared of it.

Fixing the latter seems a bit more difficult as I'm in this state of limbo caused from waiting to hear about my admissions decision to these three PhD programs, which means no decent employer is really going to take me.

So, my options that may fix the latter involve swallowing my pride and working some job in retail or lying to a prospective employer that is looking for a more long term job candidate (I mean, there is still the possibility that none of these graduate schools take me, so it wouldn't be lying entirely).

Another possibility is taking a trip to Ecuador for a few months to visit family I haven't seen for a decade or so, working on their farm, and as a result, entirely removing myself from my s**t lifestyle. This is a gamble, though. What if I don't get accepted to a PhD program? I will have squandered away a few months of my life simply to return to the same living conditions I left from. That terrifies me. If I stayed here, I would at least make enough money to pay for a downpayment on an apartment in a city where I can actually find decent work.

If you've read this entire thing, please respond. Also, you most definitely deserve a prize of some kind . I suppose one of my big questions is "how do you get your feet on the ground and begin a career?" If I don't get into a PhD program, I feel like I worked way too freaking hard in undergrad to be a total failure like this and I feel like the possibility of not getting into a PhD program is very real because I have nothing to show for the year I have been out of school except dropping out of an MS program I disliked and my grades in that program were total garbage (C's and B's). Maybe I just need to check myself into a mental hospital, because this whole ramble sounds insane, haha.

this is way too freaking long for anybody besides a therapist paid by the hour to read, haha. srry.

I read it. It is VERY interesting. You sound exactly like me. What do you think could be some ways that you would be more productive? I also want to ask you, what do you think about the events in Arizona and have you heard of the project MKULTRA and other brainwashing programs in the American Government?

I think going to Ecuador is a great idea. You could decompress a while, maybe do some volunteer linguistic work down there to add to your resume.

OH ROADGAMES! You are into linguistics eh!? Very interesting. SO....have you ever heard of David Wynn Miller? If not I would think you would be interested in learning about him. Be warned though. This man is evil. I think you will understand that when you read about him. Do not buy into what he is selling but rather try to understand what he is doing. Tell me when you have seen this guy, he has videos on you tube. Email me back or respond here.

I vote for this idea as well. If you have any oppurtunity to get out of your current environment even for a short amount of time. Do it! It will be a fine accomplishment and might help you career wise to have that kind of experience on a resume.