Brief introduction

Felix Stardust is a pseudonym to write about real life. It’s hard, it’s brutal and beautiful from time to time. This is life – not some Instagram fake stuff. It’s the story of a promising young man slowly going into depression, starting a drug addiction, losing the love of his life, and rebuilding himself from below. I hope it helps many young people coping with depression and showing them that there are ways out. English is the third language I learned, so please apologize grammatical errors, but it allows me to reach more people.

How it all began

The dark path of Felix Stardust began slowly and wasn’t noticed by anyone, not even himself. Felix won already much of the life’s lottery. He was born into an upper-middle class family. Viewed from outside there isn’t much to worry about.

He is what most consider to be successful. Working his way up in Finance. Having all you want: a beautiful wife, many friends, owning property at a young age and a career, which is envied by most. By the age of 30 he made more than triple the countries average salary. Always being the “young” guy at the table, the one the executive management calls when they need advice or there is trouble. Everything was fine until the end of 2019. This is where it all started to crumble. Life caught up once Covid19 showed up.

He was recently promoted to a higher management role by the age of 32. Already putting in a lot of work, his schedule got even worse. Previously he usually started at 6:30h and finished around 18:00h in the evening, but often going to 20:00 or later. This is life if you want to work your way up the career ladder.

His spare time he spends honing his swimming, biking, and running skills. His wife was similarly career driven and pursued a time-consuming hobby. Both complimented each other’s lifestyle.

But now Covid19 forced both to slow down. While they were previously already thinking on how to continue their life, they now were forced to re-evaluate their life.

Lesson one – Money does not buy happiness

The first lesson Felix learned is that money does not make you happy.

The one thing that money does provide is peace of mind regarding financial security. But once you have that, there is nothing else to be achieved with money. Because frankly, to achieve lifelong financial security, you need a few million in cash.

Nonetheless he could afford nearly everything he wants. Wanting to travel to Hawaii this year? Do it. Wanting to pick up a new hobby like sailing? Do it. Sounds great - doesn’t it? Well, it is nice – not going to lie. But it does not make you happy. Consumerism gives you short highs. But once that is gone, you are back to your life and will need to earn money again to get your next high. Making more does not make it better. In fact it makes it worse. Because the things you chase become more expensive. What once was a Mercedes now becomes a Porsche, instead of flying coach you want business etc.

Covid19 made Felix realize that he has zero purpose in life. All he chased was money. Thinking that once you have more of it, it makes you happy. Once you reach enough income and money on your bank account you would achieve happiness. But suddenly he realized it does not. Because making more just moves the goal post to needing even more.

But realizing this means that most of his identity became a lie. He spent 50-60h working for multi-millionaires to make them richer. But the money they threw at him didn’t give him a purpose. In fact. Spending so much time on making money and chasing the career, he started to realize that he is wasting his time away by doing something utterly pointless. Having no impact, except for feeding more money into the hamster wheel capitalism.

Once it dawned on him, he lost motivation to work. Meetings became dull, analysis chasing project managers around the globe seemed useless. The next career step became undesirable.

Even worse. He became ill. He was constantly tired and couldn’t sleep anymore for months. Suddenly headaches started to bother him. He lost appetite. He started to drop out on social activities and stopped being motivated for sports. It was time to consult a doctor.

All parts readable here:

https://read.cash/@FelixStardust