not a lot has changed. I'm 27 now.was forced to get a job and people say it's good to work but i don't find working fulfilling or worthwhile in anyway. I want to save enough to be NEET again. still doing what I do best, hiding in my room avoiding other people. im stuck in an edgy teen phase where everything sucks and life is miserable but now I'm too old to be moping around anymore but it's all I know. I don't see the value in much. this existence will all be over eventually......

I was ~16 years old when I first visited. A lot has changed, but much also stays the same. My personality has solidified a lot relative to when I was a teenager. Much of the (merited) hate and disgust I had for others when I was younger has morphed into a something a bit more compassionate; the way I view things now, many of the people who have caused me to suffer over my life are the product of bigger or more fundamental problems, so I worry about the acts of individual people less frequently now. In a similar vein, I had a lot of utopian dreams about how to fix the world as a teenager, but I don't have any interest in such things any more since making anything but the smallest changes is intractably difficult for an individual person. Dismissing any problem much bigger than tidying up my desk as practically impossible has also decreased the number of things I routinely worry about, however unfortunate it may be that countless forms of badness will continue to engulf the world. Other than these changes in perspective, I have many of the same hobbies as back then, but I also came to like math and computer stuff a lot more, which my teenage-self would not have expected. As a result, I have been fortunate to find (parts of) what I now do for work interesting and rewarding, but work ultimately just feels like a distraction from the things I really find valuable. No 3DPD; I am still with mai waifu. Still spending time on imageboards and anime, though I don't vent my woes online as much as I did when I was younger (don't get anything out of it). Still plagued by regret, intrusive thoughts, various flavors of despair, and wishes I would die, but I have exchanged a big chunk of depression for a comparable magnitude of schizophrenia, which is good. Still trying to focus my attention away from hell world and towards the abstract and beautiful.

>>28470
It is a rough time to be an internet dweller. AI has been amusing, but it's no replacement for the "soul" which seems to have been scrubbed away by FAGMAN and the soaring number of normalfags and their ipad children.

Can't remember exactly when I started popping in here, probably around ~2010. For the most part I became less emotional, more detached. Part of that's probably just an age thing but I do miss the younger version of me. I was way more into games and anime in a way where I actually had passion for them, now it feels like I just kind of pick up games as a way to pass the time and it usually becomes something I can dump thousands of hours into for little cost like runescape or minecraft.

I miss the old internet. Everything's super corporate and normie infested now. Endless hours of youtube documentaries are nice though.

More than anything I wish I could go back and inhabit the mind I had. Little me had it rough but he was a lot more hopeful, less jaded and legitimately excited for whatever escapism he was partaking in.

>>28546
was browsing around the same time and feel very similarly. the anhedonia is unbearable.

im also very tired of despite being bigger than ever, the internet now feels like its so small. subcultures are dead, everything is mainstream, everything is commodified, all the edges have been shaved off and made easily digestible.

I think it's been close enough to 10 years. Or maybe it's past 10 years and I just forgot. So much has changed I couldn't possibly cover it all, yet somehow my life is still basically the same.
I work now. I do less of all my hobbies. I developed a personality disorder that has it's advantages and disadvantages. I have the same token friends and go to the same token nights out 2-3 times a year. That's becoming harder to keep up though. I used to very easily keep up my appearances as needed but once I turned 30 it changed. I spend more time in fantasy than ever before. Every year the past becomes more distant and more desirable. My memory has become a problem. It used to be good for everything, but now if I don't care things will leave as fast as they entered. It's selfish I guess, and I've certainly become more selfish. I've grown up a lot. It's an entire post of it's own to describe what growing up has felt like and what changed along the way.

>>28470
It's probably been about 10 years for me. Severe pain from eyesight issues at 16 annihilated any future I could've dreamed of (as if I wasn't a shut-in between 11-16) and after being in severe pain I made a crazy attempt at fitness, only to get a cartilage injury by the time I was 21. Still went to the gym often and thought I'd have recovered to the point I could start martial arts, but it never came and I'm 28 now. Also got a degree in that time and diagnosed with ADD, moved abroad to avoid having to return to my parents but failure to be accepted for grad programmes or jobs have forced my return. Since the age of 11 I've been unable to share things with my family really.

At this point I just wish to die pretty much every day, even though ironically I can get more enjoyment out of things than when I was 17-20 (severe pain led to anhedonia). Can't relate to normal people, can't improve physically due to bad luck, can't find something to focus on (science) as it relies on the whims of someone accepting me... really I'm tired and wish I just died when I was 16 to stop seeing my mind become so corrupted by pain.

I wanna say 12 years since I first visited here when I was 19. Back then I was far more idealistic about the future, who I'd be, and what I'd be doing. I can safely say I've done like one or two things my past self would be proud of, but not much else outside that. I have no real ambition for the future beyond finishing everything I want to do, and have no ambition outside of that so bad that I'm afraid if I ever finish my life will be truly empty so I just give myself more and more goals to fill the void.

I've dreaded the real world more and more as time goes on, and went from having a social life while in the education system to never making friends at work and just being alone at home with Mom all the time. I want the world to leave me alone but I know that even when it does the only one tormenting me is me. I pray for it all to stop and for me to become more satisfied with the life I have, or simply for something to cause all life to end in an instant.

When I first came here I was about 18-19, sometime in 2010-2011. I'm a few days from 32 now.

Relatively speaking, those were good times. Life still sucked, but at least being an adult meant my family started treating me like a human being instead of a dog, and I'd recently upgraded from a 1998 toaster to a half-decent 2010 laptop. That allowed me to catch up on some of the games I missed out on in the 00s, plus finally get into anime now that I had something resembling HDD space. Being out of high school meant I no longer had to deal with the dregs either. My only responsibilities were coursework (all at home, thanks to online classes) and a comfy job at my college's library, where the people weren't unpleasant like in high school. Outside of that I'd spend my time watching anime, programming, trying to gamedev, and playing a ton of video games. Especially Minecraft. I still miss that old beta server we had here.

Nowadays I've grown in some ways and regressed in others. On one hand, I have a degree, a full time job, and an apartment where I can be left alone. But on the other, I've found myself hating people again the way I did back in my mid-teens, likely because I'm dealing with the dregs again at my current job. Hell, they're everywhere now, it feels like the only place I didn't encounter them IRL was during college. It feels like anyone worth talking to leaves this dump of a town once they get their degree, if not before. So all that's left are the ones who never matured past high school.

And like others have said, the internet's gotten worse. One thing I've found myself missing lately is when it used to be a lot more "segregated" for lack of a better word, like the normalfags and ideologues all kept to their containment zones, so you could hang with people online who not only shared common ground with you, but also weren't indoctrinated by one flavor of bullshit or another.

I first visited here when I was 17, of course, I'm 27 now. I was kicked out of my childhood home at 23 (or 24? I'm not sure) and now live with roommates, but it hasn't changed much. I've been told I'm the ideal roommate since I basically never leave my room, don't really ever cook anything and don't make any noise. The roommates are people I knew from online and I was honestly surprised at how normal they are compared to me - hardcore otaku freaks, no doubt, but they regularly have people stay over and go out to parties and stuff. I drink a lot more than I used to, and I've also started smoking weed.

Still love anime and manga - I'm one of those silent majority weirdos driving the Isekai Boom, I can't get enough of that slop. Maybe it's just because I've been a big MMO player most of my life so it innately appeals to my sensibilities, who knows. But there's no shortage of animanga with which to distract myself. I go outside more now, I guess because I have to go get my food and drinks, so I'm not truhikki or whatever any more.

I still check in here because, well, to be honest, I'm amazed this place still exists. It's nostalgic, bittersweet. I have basically no social presence these days, unless you count the MMO I play, but even then, interaction is minimal. It's nice to go back to the days of shitposting with like-minded people, without having to suffer the horrendous shitpool of half-baked political "discource" that you find in something like Twitter or Reddit. I wish there were more imageboards like this one and less webcore aesthetic tryhard shit, but I've accepted it - it's like that classic Simpsons quote: "I used to be with it, but then they changed what *it* was. Now what I'm with isn't *it*, and what's *it* seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you." I can't deal with those sites so I just lurk around the net these days without really posting, though I find myself rarely even opening my browser anymore. I just play my game, drink beers and try not to think about what life could have been.

Sorry if my post is a bit rambling/aimless. I've never been very good at getting all my thoughts out

>>28877
People who try to meetup offline often fall in the same category as social congoers who like to act weird around others. They are more outgoing than the average person using the internet for hobbies and leisure. I've seen anons say that they only post anonymously out of an avoidance habit. I'm not trying to mock them or you, but I thought it was interesting that you were blindsided by that.
>I go outside more now, I guess because I have to go get my food and drinks, so I'm not truhikki or whatever any more.
I consider visiting the konbini for supplies part of the neet experience.
>Sorry if my post is a bit rambling/aimless. I've never been very good at getting all my thoughts out
I enjoyed reading it. The last paragraph is relatable.

>>28878
That Sakura is me on every convention I have ever been to

I was 18 or 19 when I started coming here. I think I saw someone advertising it on /a/ but I don't really remember. This was back when the IRC was #waifu on Rizon.

I'm in my 30s now and a completely different person, which should be the case given I was a literal teenager. In the decade between now and then there's been so much that's happened both in my own life and in the world generally that's it's a lot to go into. But in a somewhat funny turn of events I'm in a somewhat similar situation now as I was then and back living with my parents.

The internet is much worse now than it was then, and the culture that used to exist on imageboards has completely changed. It's still a familiar enough medium to lurk on, but it does feel like imageboards are dying. They're still preferable to social media for my current needs anyways. It's naive to expect any culture online or not to stay the same forever, but I hope imageboards can at least continue to exist as an alternative for non-normalfag users and as different from social media.

I'm exactly as I was, except my emotions calmed down. I always knew I would remain the same because if you change nothing, nothing changes..

10+ years sounds such a long time, but 2014 sounds like yesterday.
One of my strongest memories from back then was being a fellow 15/16 year old hiki/NEET and reading through a hiki thread on /jp/. Back when they used to have those, I guess.. and everyone was older. Mid to late 20s. I always remember thinking "well its fine that I'm hikineet because these guys are too, and they're much older."

Then I quit imageboards for several years, secluded myself in MMOs and only got interaction through guild chats. We were all around the same age, but no-one else was hiki/NEET. So some got married and had kids and left, now it doesn't really exist. I can't face starting over again on a new MMO now and being 15 years older than everyone as well as being a loser NEET.

Recently it started messing with my head that I stepped back and it wasn't 2013, I hardly remember anything since then. So I went back to some old places I remember pre-timewarp.
When I last checked 4/jp/ and a few altchans, it was a bunch of teens, some in some sort of clique. Even though I too was a teen poster once, I wish they weren't there, or weren't the dominant demographic now. I wish I could be surrounded by the posters I spoke with from back then. But they would be 40+ now, and chances are they became normals or took a permanent vacation.

>>28470
It's funny some here are similar. Formerly-underage posters who didn't escape. As well as the older ones too. I'm glad we can suffer together.

>>28470
that's basically me discovered around this in 2010 and not much has changed, all my friends moved away still in contact with 2 of them but i feel it's kinda sad to not make anymore new friends. i started collage 5 years ago and still stuck in it. i did get a better job but work friends are weird, you don't really know them and your just forced to socialize with them. and everyone gossips to each other, it makes me scared of what they say about me. i also stopped watching anime full time, occasionally i'll pick up an older series but i have been reading more.

I guess since 10 years ago, when I was 13, I have overcome severe social anxiety to the point to where I can leave the house. It used to be that my mother or someone would have to talk to the server at a restaurant or a cashier at a grocer. There was one time I was out, and some guy said to me, "I can tell you need to get out more." Those sorts of interactions always further pushed me into isolation because it enhanced the sense of alienation I experienced, that feeling like I didn't belong anywhere. I'm not a NEET anymore and have managed to acquire basic education. I've managed to make fleeting friends and have interactions with people out of the house, but I can't seem to hold one for greater than 6 months. Otherwise, I still have no friends. My mindset isn't as limiting as it was when I was 13. At that age, I had simply chose to lay down and rot because I thought I had no future ahead of myself. Now, I'm trying as best as I can despite my limitations. I have far more empathy than I did as a teenager, and I am not as harsh or as cruel as I once was. I don't really watch anime anymore, but I'm now more into Japanese tea culture. At the same time, I feel like my mindset has degraded, in a sense, because I am less accepting of my circumstances now than I was then.

I guess based on my recollections of imageboards from that time period, is that some of the people around there were genuinely kind of messed up. I remember those old battlestation threads where people would post rooms that were full of piss bottles, doujins, and cigarettes. Now, they all look like carbon cut-out rooms from middle upper-class people. I guess another thing was imageboard users were far poorer, making laptops out of pizza boxes, setting poverty bitcoin mining rigs, and other creative workarounds. I'm reminded of the time /v/ beat Reddit in Tribes Ascended, and there was an image floating around. It mentioned Reddit users being highly prepared and having fancy setups, while /v/ had the toasters and crappy internet, and /v/ still won. The description of Reddit reminds me of 4chan currently. Feels like a lot of the individiuality has left. Nowadays, the complaints of imageboard users seem just like run-of-the-mill complaints that young adults typically have. If you tried to say some of the things that people said now then, then you'd get called ungrateful, to man up, and to stop being a baby. Another thing I've notice change is that shitposting was not seen as a good thing, and it was not desirable to be a shitposter. Though, I've seen that a lot of users used to say things out of irony, and it feels like it led imageboards to be flooded with a special type of idiot that thinks that they are in good company. It's not that there were not idiots before, but it feels like things have further degraded.

>>28959
>When I last checked 4/jp/ and a few altchans, it was a bunch of teens, some in some sort of clique.
It seems like many of them just want to be there so they can posture themselves as "unique." Then, they go onto mock the genuine outsiders. Many of the older posters back then you mentioned, would be mocked and excluded now. I never really understand why those more normal types end up on imageboards. If you want to enforce societal norms and do not want to be surrounded by unusual individuals, then why would you hang out on such a website given its history?

Post edited on 24th Apr 2024, 11:25am

I'm 31, probably been posting on and off for maybe 11 or 12 years. I thought I would be making money on the internet by now.

It turns out that I had undiagnosed, vague health issues which prevented me from doing anything or truly trying at anything. I recently cured them and it's like "wow this is how normal people feel. I just wasted my whole life, more or less". Everything was now so easy.

Sometimes I think about everything I did for my "depression" or "chronic fatigue". Every therapy session, the time I tried antidepressants, healthy eating, trying to have a consistent sleep/wake-up time, the endless planning over and over for how not to waste my life-- every single thing was utterly worthless. It was just bad luck that nobody knew how to fix my health issues until I stumbled into it about a month ago.

And I think about all the years I gave up and lapsed into drug abuse and video games, being tremendously sad all the time. All the desperation, the frustration, the despair, and the lament at my future and present.

Years and years the thinking was "I can't do anything, so I'm useless." "No matter how hard I try, I always fail. I must just be stupid." "I'm so lazy, I want to try harder but I just can't." It was all a bullshit spook waste of time. I really felt like dying all the time. The feelings I was feeling weren't normal. In all likelihood I was going to blow my head off. Counterintuitively, it was actually good that I was able to have some fun with drugs, even socialize a tiny bit and feel a little bit normal, have some hope to get me through it all.

Now I'm an expat living in a warm country with a much lower cost of living. Thankfully my parents are still supporting me so I don't have to work very much, and even when I do begin to do internet work soon I won't have to work that much. I am completely alone and I don't feel lonely at all. I thought I would be drowning in loneliness but when I left my life behind all the loneliness and sadness left me.

Didn't see any of it coming. I thought I would have killed myself by now. Now I actually like how things are turning out. I just wish it didn't take so long.

>>28980
IF you don't mind, could you tell us what this medical condition was?

>>28981
I'm wondering too, do you have non-24 sleep-wake disorder or something >>28980 ? I know there are medications that basically cure it but it takes forever to convince neurologists you actually have it. I'm fairly sure I do and have yet to put the work in to fix it even though it's a condition that ruins everything basically.

>>28981
>>28985
Overall it was digestive issues. I'm pretty sure it was a candida overgrowth at first. A few years ago during my last semester of university I fasted for 10 days and cured it. It didn't fix everything he but the permanent depression went away over night and I stopped craving sugary sweet things all the time.

I still had a chronic fatigue and really bad brainfog especially after I ate, impossible to be productive. Late last year I had a series of very lucky things happen and pieces of information make their way to me, taking me up to a month or so ago. I did a number of other things during that time but nothing helped as much as taking some probiotics, so I think I had gut dysbiosis. Also dealing with stress, normalizing sleep, fixing diet, certain supplements.

>>28985
>non-24 sleep-wake disorder
I looked this up, and apparently it's not normal for your sleep times to constantly be moving. Wow. I've lived like this most of my life, and I didn't know it could possibly be considered a disorder. I've never ever been able to properly keep a schedule. The only way I can keep a schedule is through work or school, but even then, it's like my body revolts at me for trying to wake up at a normal human time.

>>28985
>>28997
>non-24 sleep-wake disorder
counting me thats three of us that have this supposedly rare condition. do you guys think you developed this from too much computer use? because im pretty sure i wasnt born like this.

also as uninteresting as it is i would really like to hear from any NEETs who DONT have this condition, as i find it kinda hard to believe that if you can choose when you sleep that you do it at the same time for months on end. i know of two other people who have constantly shifting sleep schedules/alluded to that fact, but ive never actually heard someone affirm that they arent capable of shifting their sleep schedule.

>>29070
I don't know if I have this exact condition, but my sleep schedule is definitely not the "ideal" one - I wake up randomly throughout the night, and I seem to function best at 12am-1am.

Neets stereotypically seem to have shifted sleep schedules. While it could be possible that they habituated themselves to this, I also wonder if maybe there's a shared genetic trait here. Sleep schedule has known links to things like schizophrenia, depression, etc..

>>29074
I have the inverse, I sleep solidly after initially waking but up I fall back asleep usually 4 times before getting up. Regarding hours, I have a fairly wide sleep-timing-range that typically is between 2-5 but fairly consistently get out of bed around noon. Sometimes it's related to physical ailments resulting in drowsiness, but in the end it's largely disciplinary as even when I wake up with a clear mind I usually still stay in bed till it feels wrong to do so, the comfort of the bed is too great as is the effort to physically rise when I'm horizontal. I've been meaning to attempt raising the angle of my bed to see if it alleviates the latter but have yet to do so.

Regarding high proportion of night hours, it's mostly preference; I covet the night's silence and the stillness it brings. Beyond such, for me, I think another reason that may contribute to crepuscular sleep cycles are aligning the hours at which it feels normal to eat with my digestive system (i.e hunger and energy shifts from eating). I only eat one meal a day and a small snack around midnight, my hours being as they are has the historical range for supper time fall around 5-6 hours after I get up, this aligns with when I begin to feel hungry, it also allows the main digestion to finish just before the sun begins to set, which feels nice.

>>29070
>ive never actually heard someone affirm that they arent capable of shifting their sleep schedule
I think that's as it should be, to reflect the shifting of the suns hours, whether or not you prefer light or dark, circadian rhythm and all that, I would guess most animals are like this. Though that makes me curious as to whether ethnicities who historically reside primarily around the equator have greater difficulty to/from shifting their sleep schedules
>too much computer use? because im pretty sure i wasnt born like this.
Perhaps, contemporary artificial lighting methods are a lot harsher than a candle, it wouldn't be surprising if it blurs the physiological differences between night and day more than past eras. It also makes us stay inside more isolating us from differences in outdoor conditions further increasing monotony. It could also be that these things or whatever else don't really reduce ones capability to sleep during typical hours but by increasing the ease of staying up give way to a tendency to just go to bed whenever one pleases as you allude.
For my part, I've always found getting up really early results in grogginess but it increased heavily in severity after hitting puberty. I've used the computer probably >10 hrs a day for the large majority of my life. Which can be considered with the above summary for whatever it's worth data-wise.

Post edited on 7th Jun 2024, 4:08am