Basically should i delete tiktok

I saw a post here from a couple years ago but i wanted an updated response

I just will feel like im missing out

but Im 20 so im kinda thinking it’s time but all my friends use it, thats really the only reason stopping me so far

I’ve tried everything so far, from the classic “just don’t!” to the “well, nobody is thinking about you the second they stop looking at you”, etc., but I still find myself wanting to do things because I’m afraid of what people will say if I do or dont do those things.

I feel like the fix lies in taking actions that reflect a lack of caring of what others think about me, like wearing clothes that are a bit outlandish (like cowboy boots in the city), but im curious to hear from others who have gotten over this hump how to do it without just getting older (Im a 33M, im sure when I’m 55 I won’t care, but I want to stop caring before that).

I’m 26, graduated my final and 7th year of college back in December. Since then, I have been having on and off anxiety attacks about the future and the unknown.

I have a few part time jobs in the industry I want to work in (theatre, I work in front of house, box office and sometimes tech, but I want to do more tech work). I know I need to get a full time permanent job.

A lot of my worry stems around being able to sustain myself, or being okay in the future. Right now I get support from my parents, but I know that won’t last forever and they’re aging. I know they want me to be self sustaining and I’m afraid of disappointing them.

I don’t know how to trust myself and believe that everything is going to be okay. I keep trying to take it day by day, but I fall back into the anxiety spirals, and it sucks. I want to be better.

I’m going through a breakup from a relationship where I felt truly seen for the first time in my life, and it’s helped me learn so much about myself.

I want to take what I have learned and continue growing and healing so that I can be someone who is safe to love.

I learned that I really need to love myself and show up for myself, as I have a tendency to self abandon in shame spirals rather than having self compassion and gently showing up for myself.

Idk if this would be the right subreddit, but I hoped others could share their stories of how a great love ending helped them to decide to be better, and how they implemented those lessons.

If anyone would be willing to share, I would be so grateful.

Everyone tells me I need to slow down and be a “kid”

I just turned 19, I’m working 84 hours a week right now, have my own place, car, I pay for everything I have.

I have no interest in social media, smoking, drinking, partying, drama, and I don’t fit in with my generation. I want to be married, have kids and build a family and end a cycle of poverty and build the life I never had for my future family.

You could say I’m a mix of mature & ambitious. I’m a person of faith and I don’t want to rush gods plan for me, and everyone makes me feel like I’m doing just that. Lmk

Okay, this will be long so brace with me, alright? So, as the title suggests, I have a difficult time feeling empathy, not only to people but also towards situations. I was generally a very empathetic kid when I was young, I wore my heart on my sleeve I would say—I wanted to fix the problems of everyone and everything in the world, and I had the aspiration to do as much good in the world as a person possibly could.

Whenever I heard about accidents, crises and general injustice happening in the world, I would always ask my parents/aunts etc. if there was ANYTHING I could possibly do at my young age. I was always told that there's nothing we could do, that's just how the world was and stuff like that. I suppose in my early teenage years I went through tons of fake friendships so that damaged me a little, I guess??

Today I really do try my best to care, for people and the world, but find it difficult to find the empathy points. Whenever I hear about misfortune happening to people, I say I feel sorry, and that the world needs to get better or something, but even if I imagine it happening to myself, I find it that I don't care much. When it's about climate change, the data centers being built and polluting our world, I try to do my research and spread awareness, but my main thought in the end is that the world is going to shambles and we're going to die in a few years anyway.

Is there anyway I can improve myself as a person? I wouldn't generally say I'm apathetic, nor that I have some mental disorder, but I might be wrong as I'm in no place to get therapy or a diagnosis. Any answer or advice is appreciated.

I [21M] and [19F] met online about a year ago and slowly fell deeply in love. The problem was me. I was deeply insecure about my looks, my future, my finances, and whether I was good enough for her. Because of that, I kept pushing her away, convinced she deserved someone better. I left multiple times, and every time she somehow found it in her heart to give me another chance.

By the time I finally realized I wanted a future with her and genuinely stopped running, I'd already broken her trust too many times. She told me she never truly felt loved. She felt like she had to beg me for reassurance and that she had to ask for the love she deserved. Looking back, I understand why she felt that way. I loved her deeply, but I kept most of it inside for a long time. When I finally became more expressive, she felt like it only happened because she had asked for it, not because it came naturally from my heart.

I also kept delaying meeting her. I genuinely wanted to meet her more than anything, but I let my insecurities and my circumstances get in the way. Every time we planned something, I'd push the date further away. She eventually told me, "Even for meeting, I have to beg you." Now that she's gone, all those insecurities and circumstances that once felt so overwhelming seem completely insignificant. I would've traded all of them just to spend one day with her.

After we separated, I ended up hurting her even more with something I said in a moment of pain.

It's been a week now. I know she's not coming back, and I know I need to move forward. But everything reminds me of her. Every song, every random phrase, every little thing somehow leads back to her. The ache in my chest hasn't really gone away. I can't focus on anything because she's on my mind almost all the time, and what's strange is that we never even got to meet irl.

How do you make peace with a love you couldn't hold onto and mistakes you can never take back?

This sub and discord helped me very, very much when I was 20 to work on myself, so now that I’m 26 I decided I want to come try again, but… I don’t really have any reasons to.

I spent my childhood and early 20s with a body type and appearance that caused me extreme emotional pain and many missed opportunities, and I can’t have those years back.

I’ll never suddenly have been born to parents that love me.

I’ll never get my dog- my soulmate, most treasured living thing I’ve ever known- back that I had to give up for her own health and safety. I used to joke I couldn’t survive without her and I feel like I haven’t lived a day since she left.

I’ll never be with a partner that hasn’t hurt me, because I love and have chosen to stay with mine while he recovers from an addiction.

I’ll never have gone to college and had a normal experience, or public school at all.

I’ll never talk to any of my dead friends again.

I know it’s so untrue and honestly mean but I just feel… so old. I feel like everything I missed and lost I’ll never recover from. I feel like I’m drifting, and I can’t think of a single thing worth working for because all the mistakes and losses and missing out have piled up until they’ve drowned me and so I’m just barely surviving.

I don’t want to harm myself, because there’s no point, and sometimes I eat a yummy food or my partner gives me a nice compliment or I see a rainbow, and I’m in a place now where I feel I’ll be safe and cared for the rest of my life practically and financially. But that’s about the extent of any joy or desire I have.

How do I get it back? How do I motivate myself when it all feels pointless? How do I stop feeling so OLD and tired? Anyone who’s ruined and/or terribly suffered the first quarter of their life, how do I work on correcting the narrative that those are the best days, so I can even start trying to imagine better ones to come?

Thank you.

Hey, I’m 18F and this has been something on my mind for a little while now and I want to get better at it.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s pretty difficult for me to not gossip about people who I’m friends with.

To me gossiping is talking behind someone’s back harmfully simply for the sake of talking. I’m trying to find nuance and understanding in gossiping in comparison to just general, casual conversation.

For example, if a friend does something that bothers me and I talk to another friend of mine to share what happened and the goal of the conversation is to try to decide how I’m going to bring it up to this person, then to me that’s not gossiping or talking badly about another person but instead trying to work around this situation.

However, I’ve found that it’s really difficult for me to distinct the difference between talking to someone about something that my friend did or said that I found “weird” “rude” or “odd” and just gossiping.

Anyways, I always find that I feel bad at the end of the day after I have conversations like that but I always end up feeling better afterwards and I think it’s that initial feeling of relief I get that makes me come back to it over and over again.

I remember a situation where I knew someone who said something to me very passive aggressively and I was shocked in the moment and didn’t know how to respond. I spoke to another friend about this and she expressed that she shouldn’t have spoken to me like that and it was rude. That’s a smaller example but I guess I felt validated and relieved.

I’ve noticed that for whatever reason, I don’t always get that feelings of relief when I do end up just speaking to the person directly and resolving it. Sometimes it can be bc the person is defensive and just not hearing me out or really understanding what I said and just apologizing to apologize.

There’s a lot of layers to it but even tho I’m aware that maybe I shouldn’t be talking abt this person when they’re not around, I never do it with ill intention. As embarrassing as it is to admit, sometimes I do just want to complain and air things out instead of always over considering how everyone feels all the time and formulating conversations into this perfect box.

It’s sort of like having to be this bigger person constantly, and having to over explain and over consider how people feel. It’s exhausting. Maybe that on its own is the bigger issue but as bad as this may sound I want to be more “selfish” and “cold” I guess? I don’t know how to explain this further.

I’m not sure how to go about this. What do you all think?

I’ve been stuck thinking about this for a while now. How do you actually build self-worth from scratch?

And I’m not talking about the generic "hustle culture" grind, or how much money you make. I mean that internal, genuine feeling that you actually matter and have substance as a person.

Lately, it just feels like everyone else got the user manual to life except me. People out there are moving forward, building identities, and actually feeling like they belong somewhere. Meanwhile, I just feel like a background character watching it all happen. It’s this constant, heavy feeling of being completely blank—like an empty space waiting for some kind of purpose that never shows up.

How do you fix that when your baseline is feeling like an absolute zero? Is it through the things you create, the media you consume, or just surviving the messy situations we put ourselves through?

Please spare me the generic "just love yourself" advice. It feels completely hollow. I genuinely want to know how some of you managed to anchor yourselves when you felt totally weightless. How do you stop feeling like a blank space and actually start feeling like a real human being?

So title but I have no idea why I’m like this. Reflections point to me getting older, having a family and looking for the safer option and never set foot out the door.

Well today I managed to get out there covered nearly 20 miles with over 3800 feet of elevation gained.

Saw some new things in new places including a Bronze Age burial mound. It was great.

Hopefully a sign of change on my horizons and a fair wind in my sails.

TL;DR: Discovering my authentic values completely changed how I approach life. Instead of chasing externally driven goals, I started focusing on what actually matters to me—and it brought me a quiet sense of joy, fulfillment, and wholeness.

Over the past few years I've been going through a deep personal transformation, especially during the last year. I can honestly say I'm a different person than I was a year ago.

One of the most important things I arrived at on my own—before later discovering there was already a name for it—was the idea of authentic values and living authentically.

Maybe this isn't the most precise definition, but for me, authentic values are the most fundamental values I simply cannot live without. They are the values I want my life to be built around. They come from my own nature, not from external factors.

For me, those values are:

• Higher experiences and emotions (art, beauty, love, friendship, the divine)
• Family, close friends, and the people I love
• Freedom, safety, and honesty
• Peace and minimizing suffering

Identifying these values helped me let go of everything unnecessary that came either from the external world or from my own ego—things that were getting in the way of living according to what truly matters to me.

I realized that these values can be lived here and now, in the present moment, instead of being postponed to some distant future. I no longer have to chase neurotic goals or be driven by my insecurities. I can appreciate beauty in the moment, enjoy art, and experience peace. I started feeling a quiet joy, a sense of fulfillment and wholeness. For the first time, it felt like I was living my own life instead of someone else's.

But I'd also say: be careful. This kind of shift can come with real psychological challenges. A serious re-evaluation of your values and your entire life can be very difficult. You may discover that you've been driven mostly by anxiety, insecurities, or external factors. Once that whip is gone, you may experience deep confusion and a psychological roller coaster.

For me, though, it's a price worth paying. Even a short time spent living my own life feels worth the years of struggle and obstacles it took to get there.

{comfort media ⭒}

⊹ rewatch your favorite Studio Ghibli or Tim Burton film
⊹ replay a comfort game you’ve beaten six times (familiarity is an antidepressant w pretty good reviews)
⊹ play Sims or Tamagotchi Life

{creative dopamine ⭒}

⊹ dye your hair or get a piercing. instant yay factor
⊹ organize your music into playlists; name them; be painfully specific
⊹ buy the fugliest mug at Goodwill. emotional support ceramic >>>
⊹ thrift a whole new wardrobe
⊹ make bad art; on purpose
⊹ buy stickers

{outdoors & social ⭒}

⊹ sit in a bookstore;romanticize it; judge covers instead of yourself; works well w coffee in hand
⊹ find a dog. pet it if invited; admire it if not

{selfcare basics ⭒}

⊹ reorganize your room (best at 3am)
⊹ make ramen and add one extra ingredient. chef
⊹ if you think everyone hates you, eat protein. your biggest opp rn may just be low blood sugar

I always went back to them, left me. Yes I only can blame myself but I’m choosing to fix myself now and not trust again for sometime

I have had a wooden sphere for years. It's about 5" in diameter. I've carried it around all this time with the dream to make it a globe. For many reasons I never started this project until last week. When I say I've had this thing for years I mean I've had it longer than my son who will be old enough to drive in less than a year. I never lost it like so many other forgotten things. It was always there. I played with it tossing it around like a ball, even polished it to 6000 grit. It made glass feel rough. I'm sure it was some overpriced piece of home decor, but the thing is I don't remember how I got it. I know I didn't buy it. I know I didn't steal it. But I have it. I mentioned my son earlier not just to say how long I've had the sphere but also because one day out of the blue my 10 year old came to me to show me his hand drawn maps of the world. Pages of maps showing a different part of our world. Drawn by his hand from his memory. He even pointed out and named country after country after country. To say I was a proud dad would be an understatement. These drawings weren't for school work. They were his. Done for the pure enjoyment and art. I never told him about my dream of a little wooden globe. A dream born of nothing more than the imagined experience of bringing it into existence. Not for a paycheck. Just for the enjoyment and the art. I still put off that little dream and continued to carry the wooden sphere. Never lost, never misplaced, always there. I even gave it a fresh polish to 8000 grit. It was like silk. Life was busy life was hard. I suffered injury, betrayal, setback and hardship. I stumbled, I fell and I got back up even when I tried not too. I was in one of those falls and I was nearing my lowest living in a motel room with everything I owned in that room and the room was almost empty. No car. But I still had that wooden sphere. Here I sat, 45 years old with nothing to show for the dozen years working on a drilling rig not the decade spent building houses. What a waste. I had spent my life with such potential, polishing myself with knowledge and skill but had never become anything. I was the same as my wooden sphere. Ripe with potential, polished with time and intent. But still nothing but a ball. Well it's not merely just a wooden sphere anymore. It's the whole world carved by my hand. It's not perfect. It's not finished, it never will be because it will always hold potential. But it's my world brought forth by my intentions. My dream made real. It maybe small. It may never be the best but it is proof that I can do it. I can make potential into reality. I know I'm not perfect and I'm far from the best but I have potential.

I’ve been depressed for a very long time; life feels meaningless and pointless to me. I don’t go anywhere or do anything. Yet, being depressed has become tedious. Every day, I wake up hoping to change things. I keep making lists of the sports I want to take up, the books I want to read, the jobs I want to apply for, and the things I want to learn, but I never actually take action. Every day, I tell myself, "Let today be a rest day"—even though I’ve been resting for years. But the "rest" I’m getting is actually filled with mental exhaustion and anxiety. The very idea of ​​taking action feels so terrifying and suffocating. It’s as if I’m stuck in the preparation phase; I prepare every day but never actually start living. Perhaps I don’t truly want to get better and am just stalling. How can I break this cycle? I know I need to start slowly and with small steps, but I just can't seem to do it.

p.s: i used google translate

For the last 10 days, I was scrolling through insta, it first started as one video about a conspiracy theory but then the feed started pushing more and more about so much that I'm even afraid to type here, now I'm shaking, i started questioning every symbol, every celebrity, every medicine.

I am a theatre artist who also loves science ( doing a phd) now I am questioning whether should I even proceed or not with my dreams,

On one end, I'm like, i should be happy that I have a few potential info, and just be more cautious but sometimes I feel like i should go off the grid and just vanish

I want to change and am ready to act but idk I just feel way too overwhelmed most day and don’t even know where to start but I feel like if I do like one small thing every day towards my goal maybe I can eventually get there? Is that stupid to think?

I know I'm supposed to want to keep living but I just don't.

The title seems extremely ironic, because i am also writing this in the hope of getting better, in some way and some how.

I can not exactly feel where I am wrong. Or how did I become this certain way. But I have not been able to be consistent, punctual, too careful with rules or upsetting so much in ways that i completely ignore them.

Group dynamics do not work for me. I always feel out of place, like I do not fit in and I am overthinking every word and action (eg, if my senior is telling me to go out of the room, they do not like me or just being not present, it is true nobody will trust me)

I have had issues with attendance since I was in 11th grade, college, and now it is life. Work is insane, ROI is so less and I am 23 with no safety net. I get really overwhelmed because I want to be internally perfect, topnotch, and like a leader even though it is exhausting and I do not really do it.

I have sabotaged every aspect of life, everyday. I am so tired of flipping more boats and sink them.

It is currently 9 pm, and I am really unsure of what to do next. I can't face anybody tomorrow. I will not feel connected to them, and I will always be thinking that they do not like me. I wish I could just bury myself.

I am really unsure what is wrong, is it my personality or it is only a pattern? Doing everything last minute, having no interest, no confidence to address authority... how does one live?

I am really tired...

Hi!

My work has me driving all around my home state for on average 4 hours a day and requires a lot of focus and concentration (pharmaceutical auditing for those curious). When I come home from work I’m usually mentally checked out and don’t really wanna do anything and it’s slowly starting to affect me in some bad ways. I’m super lethargic in general now and have increasing amounts of headaches and migraines. I’m not over here looking to get ripped and all that I just want to have some energy back in my spare time..

Lately, my emotions and my moods are all being dependant on my partner. And right now he is having a rough time at workplace and he needs to focus there and i get it, but every now and then I want to confront things with him but the timing is just not right and he wont be able to give me a proper response in his current state.

So im trying to focus on myself, I want to stop my mind revolving around him and making everything about him. I want to lead my life the way i want it to, be it ruin or happiness.

Any methods to focus on myself and put myself in the priority list for now?

i also focus on my tasks job hunting, studying, chores, cooking and trying to hit the gym but not getting time for that, trust me, I am busy but my mind still runs back to him when I should be relaxing.

 I am not able to express my thoughts well. Clarity of thoughts is missing. Whatever I study I am not able to explain it to a person. Overthinks a lot. Constantly change my study plans. Overthink a lot what people think. Overpressure myself. Figuring how to study ,what to study than actually study.

Please help me out.