I am what you might call a "tech guy". My father gave me my first computer at age three, and I've grown up with the things. I have been escaping my life time and again using computer games. I still do at times.
Whenever I should have been doing something "sensible", I pushed it off and started playing. Sometimes excessively. The habit is still with me, to a degree.
I have played World of Warcraft for a bit over a year. Then eventually I had the same realization that came to me after playing Diablo 2 for about five years (with breaks and low intensity periods). It felt pointless. I was trying to waste hours away to avoid something. I was trying to fill my life with something, but in the end I realized that the things I did were meaningless, empty.
These escapes are great if you just want to take your mind off things, the same as watching some favorite show on TV. But eventually you get to the point where you realize they don't feed that drive in you. That's when I quit WoW, and decided to spend my time at least a little bit more productively.
I started playing online poker. Yes, I can hear you laugh. It's more of the same, but with a minor twist. This time, when I procrastinated and escaped into playing poker, I at least made a little money while doing it. Not all that much, and I probably could have made much more spending my time actually doing some work, but it allowed me to spend just a little bit of extra money on things that were important to me.
I was able to make enough to go to Spain with my family. Actually, we just paid for that vacation out of my regular income and used the "poker money" to pay off the final rate for our family car, but that's not important.
I bought a few books from this extra "pocket money", a birthday present for my wife (hey, she doesn't know just how much or how little I have in my poker bank account, so this was perfect for not letting her now how much I paid for her gift!), and most recently I cashed out most of my remaining money to book a reading with Erin.
So, to give all this meaning: by even changing my habit only SLIGHTLY, I was able to turn something completely pointless into something that allows me to periodically make one more step forward than I would have normally been able to do. And while I do not at all suggest you do the same as me, I do suggest you try to find something you like and already do habitually, and look for ways to do something similar that at the same time can take you just a single step forward.
The difference can be very noticeable. The least you might find is that this can help fight the feeling of being totally useless. You're not. Do things that make you feel good instead of just superficially happy. Don't try to just have fun (and then later on cry over the futility of it all when you get back home and your thoughts strike back). As Erin said, try to help somebody else, to express some warmth to any person, unconditionally, i.e. without expecting even the tiniest bit of gratitude.
See if that makes you feel better about yourself (this is exactly what this is about: how you feel about yourself!).
In my teens I sometimes felt as if I was drifting in a grey void, without control of where I drifted, no purpose, no destination. I felt small and helpless. It took some time, but eventually I consciously changed my perception of this imagery. I imagined myself in this void, but I imagined I could command where I wanted to go, could control my movement. Naturally, in a void movement or control is logically meaningless, because you're still just "hanging in there". But the shift in perception, subtle as it is, is anything but meaningless. Try it out. Try picturing your fears and changing some detail that bugs you about it. I dare you to imagine differently and see what happens.
Eddy
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