STATUS

you okay there

^^^^This.

Whenever I feel defeated, I go and kill time with either some old video game I love or an anime series I half-want to watch (somewhere between MUST NOW and Meh, whenever...). The blahs are all-consuming. People can shower me with feel-good rhetoric like "hang in there", but we all know it's empty and vapid when you're in that deep of a rut.

But eventually I come out of it, not by some miraculous IRL event that solves everything, but by my body's own chemical disinterest in being depressed all the time. That's when I need to seize the initiative, think outside the box, and attack my problem. Tough as it is, and goofy as it sounds, I need to get positive. It's Antonio Gramsci's maxim at work; Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will.

Failure to what? From what I've seen, you're a good dad who makes time for his kids and his wife. Sacrifices his game dev hobby for his family. A job loss isn't your fault. It seems you've done a great job until now, if the intelligence and wisdom to create a full-fledged successful RPG are anything to go by. You've enabled a site to continue running that has provided joy to thousands of people. Or if you don't believe anybody else, you've helped me, at least. Dunno if you remember this, but you gave me RPG Maker VX Ace on Steam and it enables me to express my creativity in a way that satisfies my soul. I thank you for that.

Okay. I've mulled over this status enough. Mr. Anderson, you feel like you're a failure? With a wife and a kid and a hockey obsession?

Here. Here's a litmus test.

Me: dead wife, no kids, lives with father, sits at a computer all day making video games that nobody gives a shit about and I can rarely get download numbers past the single digits, is in and out of the hospital, and is 36-years-old. If you had to choose between me and you, but couldn't choose both, which of us would you be forced to call the success and which of us is the failure?

This is RPGMaker.net. We're all driftwood in a sea of our collective tears.

Was this actually supposed to actually be a status chain, or...?

Aight I'ma seriouspost here

It's OK and normal to feel like a failure in these situations; everybody does it, because as a culture we put a LOT of importance on having a job, to the point that we automatically believe that someone without a job is worthless. But this is based on assumptions like "There are plentiful good jobs available," "Whether or not you remain in a job is your responsibility," and, at its most basic, "Bad things only happen to bad people, or sometimes OK people but only if they are not me."

The truth is, the job market is shitty, and the vast majority of people who lose their jobs have literally no impact on that job loss, because it's the choice of higher-ups. On the one hand, this means that you have no control in an important factor in life. On the other, though, it means that you have not failed, any more than a person painting a fence failed at painting the fence because he got hit by a car.

Let's also unpack the idea "I am a failure." This is a different assumption from "I have failed." The latter is a statement of "I did a thing," a one-off action. The former is a statement of "I am a thing," that not only has the thing happened, but it will continue to happen, because of some kind of supernatural personal trait.

This is horseshit that your brain is feeding you because you have the sadbrains, which means that your brain is a total asshole that's only comfortable if you believe you're horrible. You cannot trust your brain to give you objective reports on this front. It can't even regulate your serotonin properly, for Pete's sake! (Also even a healthy human brain is basically a pile of stupid shortcuts and not the great objective observer we assume it to be, so yeah, don't trust your brain, it's a pile of crap.)

You know who you can trust? Outside observers. The people in here who are saying you're not a failure because of this and that. You can trust us because we don't care about your Innate Horribleness, we care about results, and in our opinion your results are fine. You have exceeded basic standards for being Not a Failure. You will not feel comfortable with this assessment, because, again, your brain is an asshole, but you should at least trust that we're capable of observing the times you done good, and the times you fucked up, and deciding that the former outweighs the latter.

tl;dr- Nah dude, you're fine. Not a failure. Trust those of us who aren't in the middle of your situation, because your brain is being an asshole and giving you false impressions of reality. You'll get through this because you're an OK human.