love working on cars too but that leads to me getting high
Just out of curiosity, why does working on cars lead you to getting high? Seems like if you love it, that could be a great choice of something to focus on.
Personally I realized after I got off opiates a few years ago that the thing I was missing, the thing I loved the most as a kid, was music. So now I focus all my extra time outside of work focusing on music, I'm in a band and I play 3 or 4 hours a day most days, write music, play shows, etc. It fills me up in this way that nothing else does, I wake up every day excited about it. I can't even tell you how much it helped. I had to overcome some self-defeating stuff to get here, but I'll never go back.
Maybe you are suffering from what so many other people do in this culture: acute existential pain. I'm not trying to be funny, I think it is real. The lives prescribed for all of us usually do not make but a fraction of us happy or fulfilled. And it can be a lonely feeling when you realize that you have to chart your own individual course. There are no road-maps and half the time you will have people telling you to grow up and get down to the business of living the empty adult life that was set out for you. My son (almost 30) comes home and works until he has enough money to go back and volunteer. It engages him on a profound level so he doesn't mind doing manual labor or waiting tables or whatever he can do to raise the funds he needs to go back. You cannot believe how many in my extended family say, "When is he going to grow up and settle down?" Meanwhile, in the next breath, they complain bitterly about their own lives.
But that really is the key. You have to ask yourself, "what means something to me?" What do you care about? If you cannot think of anything that you care about then that probably means you have lost the relationship to yourself that you so naturally had as a child. Now you have to heal that depression, and it can be hard to do when you are in the thick of it, but I have found the best thing is to take small positive steps out of your old ways of thinking. Most of us hold ourselves so tightly in check because of the way we think we have to appear to others. Anything that you can do to get yourself out of your head and engaged in something--it could be a long walk, taking up a creative pursuit, pursuing interests that you used to have that may have been shoved away as non-productive. Personally I like mindless work, too, as long as I have outside stuff going on that I feel challenged by. When it is just mindless work and coming home to my own head, that is a recipe for depression for me.
Such a great post, some really good advice in here.
Yeah, my girlfriend struggles with feeling empty and worthless. It's largely due to her family too. She works random low-wage jobs and then goes to California for 2 months a year to trim buds and make half of her money for the year or so. She really enjoys that part, and not so much the rest of the year's work but she has things that make her happy, like gardening, hiking/camping, and me and her friends. Yet her family is always hounding her about "growing up and settling down". It affects her so much, it really pisses me off because they're just concerned about her, they mean well, but they can't seem to see how much it's hurting her. And it's been happening all along so it's pathological now. Her dad had this really specific idea for what would "be good for her", and he's pretty controlling. He told her he wouldn't pay for college unless she went into art history and got an art history degree. She hates art history, but she did it, and now she has a useless degree. College was so painful and stressful for her because of this that she refuses to ever go back. She really wanted to study biology and go into wildlife conservation. She's really passionate about that, but she will not allow herself to believe that it's something she could do, she feels like it's too late for her (even though she's only 30). It's really painful to see. Meanwhile her dad keeps pressuring her and acting like she's just lazy or something. And the most ironic/aggravating thing is that he hates his "standard" work life too. It's like people just think that's how life is, like "welp, you're an adult now, it's time for life to suck just like it does for the rest of us". But that's insanity, life doesn't have to suck. You just have to figure out how to emerge out from underneath all the societal expectations and find what you love. If you are doing what you love, even if you never "make it big", you'll be happier than most of the people that "make it big" because doing what you do is its own reward.
Your son is lucky his mom is such a badass, herby.