I feel like nothing I do really matters.

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I'm taking night classes after work for software development but I don't know if I will fail the course or if I pass the course I don't know if I will ever get a programming job or if I do get a programming job I might be so bad at it that I get fired.

I already get confused in my current software testing job. When I get stuff wrong my supervisor gets mad. I make stupid mistakes all the time. I can't remember stuff they told me a few weeks ago. Also I work really slow because I can't concentrate very well and sometimes I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I'm just not smart enough for this job but that means I'm not smart enough to be a programmer either.

I just feel like nothing I do matters. My house got robbed and they took my computer and my video game collection. What was the point of collecting all those games if they were going to get stolen? I don't feel there's any point in me buying more games because they might get stolen or destroyed by fire or something else.

My computer had photos and writings for the last 7 years. Now I don't feel like I should ever take any photos or write anything because the computer they're on might get stolen or have it's hard drive corrupted or something else.

I just feel like for everything I do, there's a chance that it won't matter. Everything I build might get destroyed.

I feel like nothing I do will have any permanent value, only get destroyed later.

How do I get over the feeling that nothing I do is of any lasting value?

There's one thing you COULD do: back up all your work.

Also: Did you report the burglary to the police? Even if can't catch the criminals straight away, by you reporting it, you are establishing the burglar's patterns, so they could catch them later.

I can understand you being pissed off. But still, don't give up. Things will get better for you.

Sorry for the length. I have had the same feeling. It is a feeling like all things end so why bother. Why bother making friends in college if they will just leave in a few years. Why buy a kindle fire if it will be outdated in a few years. Why bother being nice if no one remembers you. These are and were some of the questions I have asked myself. One big thing that helped me was watching Dr. Who. It sounds silly, but he is in the same boat that we are in. He shows a lot of aspie traits, he is alone. He hates goodbyes. When my favorite Dr. Was changing into the next, he said something that hit me really hard, because at the time I was going through a really hard goodbye. I was going through a bad ending to a friendship I did something stupid and she stopped being my friend. At the same time she was moving away due to graduation. So it ended in a bad way and I was having a hard time accepting it. Anyway the Dr. Said. "It all just disappears, doesn't it? Everything you are, gone in a moment; like breath on a mirror. Any moment now, he's a comin'.
Clara: Who's comin'?
The Doctor: The Doctor.
Clara: You, you are The Doctor.
The Doctor: Yup, and I always will be. But times change, and so must I. We all change, when you think about it, we're all different people; all through our lives, and that's okay, that's good you've gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear. I will always remember when The Doctor was me." Now what I got from this was that everything, everyone changes, but that's ok it is all part of the experience. It is hard a lot of times because nothing lasts forever, but enjoy while it lasts. Those experiences those trials are what make us the people we are. It sucks sometimes, but the good is worth going through it. I hope this helps. The main point I'm getting at is best explaned through another Dr. Who quote. "The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant." Don't give up. Keep at it, be patient with yourself. Everything you do matters. It will all work out in the end. This is what we are all fighting for. You are not fighting alone. The feeling like nothing you do matters are hard to overcome, but if you keep going forward at Your pace and do what You need to do. The feelings of that nothing you do will matter will begin to no longer matter to you. Do not fear failure. Fear not trying, not fighting.

GreenPandaLord is correct.

Extra points for the Doctor Who reference.

look upon my work ye mighty and despair.

nothing any of us is building will not get destroyed. we are building it to enjoy it while it is there, and ideally, we are enjoying the process of bulding it.

I like my book collection, but really, I enjoyed reading them, now they mainly sit there, and have become memories.
Those can't be stolen by anyone.
except by alzheimer's, amnesia and time itself.

I'm just having trouble coming to terms with the transience of all things. I mean, if I buy something I think it will be forever but it never is.

Even if it doesn't get stolen, in a few years there's a good chance it will break. If it's computer hardware it will be outdated. If it's for a hobby I will one day lose interest, no matter how obsessed I am when I buy it.

Often I'll buy a stack of games and not play any of them. I may play one for a few minutes and think "this game is really great" but even though I want to keep playing it, I can't because I'm half way through a at I haven't played in weeks because I don't have the energy.

Even when I was unemployed I spent my time on browsing, not games. Games and movies seemed like a chore. But I can't start a new one because I would lose skill on the one I'm half way through and forget the plot.

Of the few dozen games I beat, I can barely remember them. I want to play them again but then what was the point of playing them in the first place.

What is the point of having good experiences in the past? Happy memories are useless. If you're unhappy now, then your happy memories aren't helping you. Your best experiences in the past are nothing but memories so experiencing them was a waste of time because your happy memories can't cheer you up.

How can time be wasted? Is recreation a waste of time? Should time be spent pursuing career goals? How do I know career goal are objectively bettered than a gaol like completing every Zelda game? It makes no difference.

Why pursue love? I knew a man who did. His wife died of a sudden asthma attack when she was 35. Friendships often die, not suddenly, usually out of long drawn out disinterest. As you make new friends your old friends drift apart so gradually you don't even notice. The same fate awaits your new friends.

I can buy new games but I know my collection will never be as ludicrously big as it was last week. If it cannot fully recover to it's former size, why bother rebuilding it in part? At best I should buy one game at a time, buy a new game a few months later, after I beat the old one. The few dozen games they left behind mock me, a parody of my collection. Like seeing half a portrait.

How can I come to terms with the transience of all things? Is all art transient? An ice sculpture? A movie? A song? A movie can be watched again, even years later but it only lasts for two hours at a time. The fact that I can watch it five years later is not proof of the movies permanence. The fact that I would want to watch it again five years later is proof of it's impermanence. The same for a song, the same for a book. If you ever reread a book, that means when you read a book, it doesn't stay read, else you wouldn't need to read it again.

I know where you are comming from and I once thought the same way. The key os not to wait for the songs last note to fade before enjoying it. I had an experience whilst reading Tolkiens The Lord of The Rings. I wanted to get to the exiting parts, I reached those parts only to see them as a roadblock to the next exitement. I was treating life much the same way. But life is like a river it always flows forward, ever changing never standing still. I will never regain those hours. Today I will never be the person I was yesterday. The sun will set, but it will always rise again into a new day. Enjoy the jorny. Dont fret about where things are going. The destination is irrelevant if the journy is seen as bothersome changing rollercoaster. Meditation and allawing myself time to think really helped with this. Slow down enjoy the ride. Don't wait until the last note to enjoy the song, or your life and the choices it allows. The following is an exerpt from a talk by Deiter F. Uchdorf which he gave at a general conference for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints on october 2012. If you want to see or hear the rest just google the bit in parenthasese at the bottom of this post. I quoted what I thougt was relevent.

"Do we listen to beautiful music waiting for the final note to fade before we allow ourselves to truly enjoy it? No. We listen and connect to the variations of melody, rhythm, and harmony throughout the composition.

Do we say our prayers with only the “amen” or the end in mind? Of course not. We pray to be close to our Heavenly Father, to receive His Spirit and feel His love.

We shouldn’t wait to be happy until we reach some future point, only to discover that happiness was already available—all the time! Life is not meant to be appreciated only in retrospect."
(Dieter F Uchdorf of Regrets and Resolutions).

The OP might like to look into Buddhism, which is one of the few religions that addresses this. Ever heard of the Tibetan sand sculptures? Tibetan monks will spend weeks constructing an elaborate sculpture in sand, then ritually destroy it in minutes. The moral: all earthly things are impermanent and eventually will cease to exist, therefore one should not find happiness in materialism but in the drive to and goal of personal enlightenment. That sounds strange to Westerners who are told that things and money bring happiness, or that our earthly lives are lived to prove to a deity that one is fit to enter eternal paradise, a belief used to keep people in fear of "Hell" and their noses to the grindstone to appease God while the preachers live high on the hog off tithes. Back to the sand sculptures, recently monks have been doing them in public places in the US, and in one case a 4 year old boy snuck in under the rope and started playing with the sand. It's weird that a little boy would get the point better than many adults.

There are some interesting ideas in Buddhism. I think their first principle is that existence is suffering, not merely that existence contains suffering but that existence is suffering. I've often wondered if this is true. Maybe it is. Maybe it explains why people can suffer in first world countries. Are first world problems real? Maybe they exist in the mind but that doesn't mean they're not real.

Just today I overheard a girl on the train talk to a guy about how she works 20 hours per week at McDonald's while studying full-time to become a secondary biology teacher. She said it was very hard and I thought "even though she is suffering, I can't stand it because I feel that I'm not suffering enough in comparison"

I work 28 hours per week and to her my level of study would seem very light. I have 6 hours per week in class and my assignments should be finished in a few hours per week but I can't seem to focus. Like I can't think what I should be doing when I get out of class. I procrastinate. I'm sure my community college course would seem very easy to her compared to her studies.

If I had to suffer through 70 or 80 hour weeks like her, wouldn't I be happier? Wouldn't I feel more accomplished? She said university was much better than high school and it made all her planning and hard work in high school worth it.

I wouldn't know. My schooling contained a moderate amount of hard work and absolutely no planning. I'm not sure if I'll ever go to university. People at work keep telling me I can join the devteam without a degree because they're more concerned about my last job than my education. I'm not sure if this is good or bad.

It's not fitting with my cultural narrative of myself but maybe our culture is a lie to sell people on the idea of university, exaggerate it's importance. I see recruiting adds on the sides of buses but I must remember, they're just advertising. Today I listened to an podcast about how they make shows like Entourage to make people move to LA, thinking they will become actors but really it's designed to get lots of people to move into LA and so drive up the real-estate prices.

Maybe it's the same with university. Like this idea that my life isn't complete without university might be culture created by the university's marketing team. Or maybe I really do need university and it's just the lazy part of my brain trying to trick me into not going. Or maybe I really don't need university and it's just the egotistical part of my brain trying to trick me into going.

If I had a degree, I would probably tell myself it doesn't count because I haven't been to grad school and everyone's been to grad school. That's probably an exaggeration but that's another idea put into our culture. I even read in a book that undergrad studies are useless compared to grad studies. Isn't that another lie of our culture? Why spend four years on something if it's useless? It must mean more than just a ticket into grad school.

Another interesting but confusing idea of Buddhism is the idea of detachment. Maybe if I was less detached to their things, I wouldn't mind as much after they go stolen. I didn't actually use most of them but I just wanted to own them. It was like I was hoarding too many video games.

I don't think it's so bad to make your material life better but when I had hundred and hundreds of objects in the house that only gathered dust and cluttered rooms and got broken after I left them on the floor, maybe that meant I was too attached to things. Truly I should miss the items I used often, like the TVs but not games that I bought 5 years ago that were still sealed in plastic.

Was I too attached to my photos too? Most of them were trivia. I would look at them on occasion and find them interesting but was that reason enough to keep them? My old journal entries were on that computer but they were even more trivial. Why did I need to keep them. More importantly, why did I feel the need to write them in the first place? Was I such an egotist that I felt like I needed to be able to remember every day individually?

That journal started being about sensible things like video games but the last few months were mostly just descriptions of pretty Asian girls I'd seen on the train and rants about how much I hate/envy university students. Useless right? Why would I want to remember such minutea. It is arrogence to think that even my smallest experiences are so important that they must be preserved for posterity. More than arrogence. It is attatchment to fear that I will forget the memories of this very day.

Isn't that how memory works? You remember the most important experiences and the other days blur together. I felt very worried if I didn't write things down in a few hours because I was worried I'd forget them. Sometimes I wrote thousands of words about one day. Why shouldn't I allow these memories to be forgotten. Why am I so attatched to memories that I need to remember every day of my life as though it was yesterday.

They were gone. The photos, the journal entries. They were all gone. Then I remembered that I had many of them backed up on Google Drive and USB sticks. Now I have most of them back. But in the mean time it gave me food for thought.

Can this idea of being detached from things be taken too far? I don't think I should live in self-imposed poverty. Ideas such as that were probably just thought of by a young prince who wanted to appease the impoverished masses rather than share his father's wealth.

But perhaps the greatest comfort can be achieved through buying a few useful things, rather than buying so many useless things that I feel trapped under their weight. It's fine to buy things for entertainment but not too many. Like what GreenPandoLord said about The Lord of the Rings. I would begin watching a movie then get very impatient and want it to be over so I could begin watching a different movie then get very impatient and want it to be over so I could begin watching a different movie. The next movie was always more important than the movie I was watching but when I started watching the next movie it became unimportant.

Why would I need so many movies if I'm probably just going to spend most of my free time reading Cracked anyway? I read sites liked Cracked because they make me somewhat less impatient than watching movies. Movies are more entertaining but avoiding feelings of impatience is a more compelling motive than seeking the best entertainment. This is sad but true.

But do the Buddhists take it too far when they say we should not be attached to people? Perhaps it is true that I should not morn forgotten acquaintances and faded friendships and I've never seen the logic in morning the dead but who can say they have no one in the life who they would miss? I suppose ultimately I should give up attachment to my own existence. I should except that I will one day die. I should not try to prolong my existence by becoming a prop in a medschool class room. For me to want to put my bones on display is just exhibitionism.

It is attachment that makes me want to date other girls without first dumping my current girlfriend? Is it catchment that makes me not want to close my browser even though it runs slow with hundreds of tabs open? I can never read the all.

If doctors ever invent a way to make us immortal that would be very bad for me. If I lived for millions of years, that would cause me to hoard even more stuff.

I had a nightmare a while ago were I was the last man on Earth and I spent millions of years watching movies. The problem was that I tried to remember each one of them because I reasoned if I couldn't remember the experience than the experience was a waste of time. Then when my memory got full it made my huge cybernetic brain freeze up. I looked at my surroundings and saw for the first time that for millions of years I had lived in unseen squalor and filth. I'd never noticed it before because I had only looked at the movie screen. What was the meaning of my life if I was only a receptacle for movies?

Does my life still have meaning if it's composed largely of experiences that I won't remember later in my life? They say you should have goals to work towards. This is true but what if I picked the wrong goals. Without having goals that are objectively the right ones, it feels just as wasteful as not having goals in the first place. What is the meaning of my life if my goals focus only on career?

D00d, I used to be similar to you. I had boxes and boxes full of random crap, boxes full of old newspapers and magazines. I would keep items even after they had ceased to work simply because I was emotionally attached to them. Part of the problem was OCD, and I now take meds for it. Eventually I got rid of almost everything. With my part of the country having zillions of wildfires, I have been thinking of what I would do if my house burned down, what I would take if I needed to get out with only a second's notice. I have realized that I wouldn't really miss the stuff I have. It's just stuff.