anybody else living solely for other people?

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I am unhappy with my life, and have been for a long time. I have no friends in the city where I live (and just one in the rest of the world), no girlfriend (and no prospects of getting one, ever, due to my social incompetence) and am disillusioned with my career (but don't see anything else I'd rather do). To be blunt, I don't wish to live, and there is only one reason I did not committ suicide years ago: the thought of how it would make my parents feel. If they didn't love or weren't around, I would committ suicide without hesitation. So I'm stuck indefinitely living a life I don't want to live so as to not hurt people I love.

The only reason I have to keep living is my family (including Flo).
Sometimes my History keeps me going, but other times I just have no motivation whatsoever.

The only reason I haven't killed myself yet is because I could never do that to my mother.

Live for yourself, its much better.

I probably spend 8 months out of the year like that - some years more , some years less.

Most of the time I stick around out of morbid curiosity for what's going to happen to all these poor misguided NT's. Theres always a risk I might miss out totally on the fall of civilisation or something and I cant have that!

I cant suggest anything other than try and find stupid things that make you happy and concentrate on those - Im putting up with a job im totally disillusioned with on the basis that in a few years Ill have enough of a cushion to go do something more spiritually fulfilling.

As for what that is I have no idea but looking for a reason to live is reason to live enough.

i feel like that.
most of the time i think that the biggest problem in my life is that i cant kill myself because i dont want to do that to my caring parents.
but i know its "just" depression. it doesnt end, but if it would, id feel fine. im saying, its not my environment. ive been lucky in my life until now and i have pretty much everything i could wish for. but what is that good for if i only want to die.
i still have hope in medicine. in a decade or two, there will be better ADs i hope.

i used to think that i am depressed because i see no sense in life. but its the other way around. when trying 5HTP, i had a few days where the smallest things gave my life meaning and i was happy for being alive...

right now im just waiting...
time is passing by so fast and im doing nothing


ps. there are maybe two things which make me want to stay alive:

1.) i feel that life is like a game. a war game. deathmatch, everyone against everyone. if i kill myself, then the NTs actually killed me. im not letting that happen that easily.

2.) out of the past millions of years of mankind, i happened to be born in a time where stuff is happening. through the exponential growth of knowledge right now, it might be possible that im still alive when machines get smarter than us and start creating even smarter machines etc... i dont want to miss that

the greatest thing that could happen to me though would be if a giant comet would knock our planet into little pieces tomorrow maybe

I've only really started living for myself, around the middle of February. I've been a very happy person, since I've decided to live for myself.

God Save The Queen!

Bingo. Now Mom's gone (she was 89) and I've come to realize that suicide is something siblings never recover from - not that I'm so crazy about my sibs - and that it can actually be contagious i.e. one suicide in the family and then the others start dropping like flies. And I could never do that to my nephew, who is the son that I never had. That's called love, and I do love that boy, er, man (he's got kids of his own now).

But will somebody *please* come up with a reason why I (or any one individual) should stay alive?

i was extremely depressed but feeling much better now possibly due to taking amoryn; http://www.amoryn.com/index.html. 5HTP is one of the ingredients along with St Johns' Wort. it takes several weeks to gradually work for most people.
very informative web site, btw

Everything that I do
seems to be for others.
Now that I'm on my
own again, it's difficult
to give a s**t.

I was suicidal on and off since I was about 10, and I am now 20. I went through phases of drug usage, intense concentration on hugely ambitious projects and other distractions to keep myself going. I found that by sticking it out through the various suicidal phases, some lasting over a year, my overall mindset sort of changed from 'don't want to live' to 'don't care about anything' to 'don't really mind about anything'. So I'd say it eventually gets easier to deal with if you're willing to stay alive in spite of the torrents of emotional pain that people like us seem to attract lol.

A few handy-dandy reasons to live:

This world is in dire need of people like us. I refuse to leave this wreck of a planet untouched by my presence, even though I am an unemployed, perhaps slightly mad weirdo living alone in a caravan lol. Personally, I justify my life AND provide my own entertainment by doing what I'm good at and doing what I love, which means programming an online text-based virtual reality and occasionally composing colossal pieces of music. Obviously, these activities bring me no money whatsoever, but they do keep me going: I just create anything I want that humanity cannot yet provide for me, and my family pays for my food etc, which I think is entirely fair seeing as my being alive is literally a service to them at my expense, or at least, it was for a very long time.

So I am now relatively comfortable most of the time, as a result of simply putting my entirety into doing what I do, and almost nothing else, pretty much regardless of the consequences. Cos if your only options are to live your life how you want it or die, then surely going for the first option exponentially increases your quality of life while simultaneously extending your acceptable actions to anything short of death itself. That sounds like a lot of freedom to me.

I would also advise that if you have a tendency to think things through consciously, and often find everything pointless, you might want to try letting lower levels of yourself make your decisions for you, to a reasonable extent. By this I mean: thinking less about your actions and why they have to matter on any scale. For example, if I had relied on my conscious mind to work everything out correctly on its own, then I would never have even discovered the strange and obscure things that I now spend all my time doing, because my conscious mind could not have led me to them. Similarly, if you feel the need to find a point or a reason for your life or anything you do, your conscious mind will be difficult to please because it uses constant logical tests to define its opinions. Therefore, even if something DOES manage to get through the mind's gauntlet of logical tests, you may well find it unsatisfying after all, because thought is limited to the analysis of a small amount of information, and so the intellect is generally ill-equipped to deal with anything of the immense scope and depth inherent in emotions and feelings. If you want a point to your life, you may not need to look much further than what satisfies you, because if you're often satisfied then the last thing you'll end up thinking about is suicide. Really, if your life is an accurate portrayal of what you WANT to do, then you should need no more justification for your life than any regular idiot does. On the other hand, sometimes letting go of your worries and the search for a purpose can be quite liberating in and of itself.

Hope this helps someone

I am very sad that so many of you are depressed. I know how it feels, because I felt the same way off and on most of the time between age 7 or so and my mid-30's, when slowly but steadily I figured out I am autistic. It then became clear to me why so many things I had tried did not work out. Born with AS minds, we were raised as if we were neurotypical, social people, by our parents, school, etc. It is entirely forgiveable that this happened, because they (parents, school, etc.) knew of no other way. But what neurotypicals need to know to become happy, well-functioning adults is often different from what we need to know. We have some quite drastically different needs, desires, strengths and weaknesses. So we end up as young adults with (not very well understood) knowledge on how to live a life that's not ours, and we're mostly clueless as to how to live our own lives.

What this means is that we have to raise ourselves. There is no other way. This may feel silly, because you probably don't feel like you're a baby. But in a sense, the sense I just described, many of us are really babies, with no one to raise us but ourselves.

Maybe it's a good idea to compose a list here, titled "Good Ways For Aspies To..." [handle important issue in life, with full awareness and understanding of the fact that neurotypical ways & rules do not apply].

Two examples of such issues were mentioned by the creator of this thread: finding a girlfriend and making friends.

With regard to the first: my wife and I came together after getting to know each other through and through by e-mail (very long, daily e-mails over the course of about 6 months). We were a couple before we ever saw each other. No social aspects existed within the context of our getting close to one another. We only needed to consider each other, no one else.

With regard to the second: if you are completely yourself among people, doing anything you are inclined to do and not doing anything you're not inclined to do (so long as you don't hurt anybody and don't get arrested/expelled/fired/deported), then two good things will happen: (1) people who don't like you (because they think you "act weird" or for whatever other reason) won't talk to you, and chances are you don't like these people either. And (2) people who do like you will talk to you, and chances are these are the people you like too, people you have common ground with; because you displayed your genuine self, they recognized something of themselves in you, and they (with their better social skills) initiated contact with you. Some of these people can become real friends.

I really hope you can do something with this! If you don't like your life, then change it. If you end it, it will forever be what it is now.

Maybe,even i don't know that...

Interesting responses. To clarify my post, it's not that I live for my parents in the sense of doing what they want me to do, but in the sense of staying alive so as to not hurt them. I have no siblings. Also, it's not that I need a deeper reason for being alive, just that the hurt of loneliness is greater than the joys in my life.

I live for me-I wanna see what happens-I wanna live even on the worst days

I am afraid that due to my issues, when I am very low, I don't even absorb that anyone cares...not even my mother. I just cannot...feel that they feel anything for me. It is a hard thing to live with. I think of my mother, and I do not get any warmth... just a thought and nothing more. I seem to end up feeling more for unattainable obsessions than anyone else. It makes no sense. It is as if I pour all my feelings into people that will never return them. Maybe, for me, it is safer to just dream.

My mother would not stop my killing myself, I doubt...as I would simply state that she has my brother who has been a much better child than I ever was. My father only cares about how soon he can cut me off from his support. I really cannot absorb that anyone would be affected by my death.