DISCLAMER: This article is not like my others. This is the first - and possibly last - time I lay down the contents of my mind to all my readers. This is going to get depressing, cringeworthy, or both. Still, writing it all down and letting it out makes me feel somewhat better.

This is my story, and it doesn't have a happy ending. Actually, it doesn't have an ending at all, since I'm still alive, and it'll only end once I die, but that's not here or there...

Every Sunday evening, before I am about to take a shower, I take a deep breath. "The nightmare begins again" - I think. Every Sunday evening, I am filled with existential dread, when the realization hits me on the head: I am about to experience the psychological terror of being a working man, for five days again, before I'll get another two days of brief relief, and the cycle will continue.

Every night, I go to bed questioning how long will my sanity last, how long till I snap, and do the unthinkable - whatever that may entail (I leave that up to your imagination).

I dread the moment work has to start. Anyone who reads my articles knows, that my hatred towards the very concept of work is difficult to underestimate.

I also dread the moment - that I hope may never come - when they'll ask me to come back to the office. When I first started working, I immediately resented the commutes turning my de-jure 8-hour workdays into de-facto 12-hour workdays. When I was finally allowed to have home office - God bless Covid-19 - I still resented the fixed working hours, literally 9 to 5. Luckily, eventually, they allowed software developers like me to do dynamic working hours. I still resent having to do a minimum of 8 hours every day, overtime sometimes being expected but never being compensated.

Every workday, I clock in as early as possible, and clock out as soon as my 8-hour quota ends, just to minimize the window of time for a certain coworker of mine to contact me. I don't have any good reasons to dislike him, but whenever he messages me and says "Hi", what I think is always "Aw ****, here we go again...". Just looking at his avatar fills me with fear, dreading the potential moment he may contact me with a task.

And so it starts, every day. If I'm lucky, I already have a project to work on, and can expect the others to leave me alone. If I'm not, I can expect the aforementioned coworker to say "Hi!" to me at any moment, causing a heavy amount of stress to me, and increasing my resentment towards him, completely unbeknownst to him.

Am I lazy? Am I spoiled? Am I depressed? Whatever the cause is, the life of a working man, who does 40 hours a week for the same company for over a year, is just not for me. I don't mind working hard, as long as it's not constant, and not repeated. I don't mind pulling an all-nighter on a single program, if I get to spend the next day sleeping and doing nothing - arguably, working 16-hours a single day while working 0 the next day, would be better than the 8 hours on both days.

Yet, no matter how much I have to work a day - even if I have no active tasks, and thus my only task is to be vigilant and expect messages from my coworkers - I always end the workday tired, and dreading the next morning, wishing that the evening lasted forever, wishing that I could go back in time, constantly thinking to myself - When will the nightmare end?

To me, the honest work is torture. I would do literally anything - if it's a one-time thing, that is - if the end result was me being liberated from the chains of wageslavery. To me, as long as I have to do 8-hour grinds every day (save for the weekend), morality is just a spook, and there ain't no justice in the world. Give me Universal Basic Income, and then I'll change my mind about morality and work ethics - until then, both are just meaningless spooks to me. I hate my life, and I hate my work, even if it's the closest I can ever get to having my dream job.

And the worst part is? I'm one of the lucky ones. I work from home, and I work as a software developer - without even having a diploma - when my mother and I were expecting way worse (factory work at an assembly line, or warehouse work) when I got kicked out of college for failing the same subject the sixth time. My life could be so much worse. But I don't care. I'm not counting my blessings. I'm already miserable the way I am now, it makes no difference. My mother looks at others and slaps herself for complaining, but I am not my mother - if anything, that makes me even more adamant that the world is screwed and we need reforms as soon as possible. I shouldn't have any right to complain, yet here I am, complaining.

People say that "work makes you noble", but it did the complete opposite to me. It made me into an even bigger miser then I already was. It made me reject morality, reject ethics, it turned me into a selfish egoist. As long as society owes me nothing, I shall only care about myself.

The Nightmare Begins

But when did it all go so wrong? When did it all start? Gather around folks, because it's story time - or rather, sob story time. Prepare for a pathetic sob story!

I was born in a lower-middle-class family. I was always rather eccentric and antisocial, and thus suffered from bullying ever since kindergarten. Ever since that - until college -, my life was characterized by a duality of sorts: warmth and loving at home, bullying and harassment outside (in kindergarten, in school). This reinforced the introverted aspect of my personality, not wanting to take part in any social events, and just wanting to go home ASAP all the time. This made me an escapist. While others of my age were playing football (soccer) and all sorts of other sports, I burred myself in fantasy, in video games, in history, and all sorts of other "nerdy" interests. Another contrast between me and others my age was in music taste - I liked rock and metal, while everyone else preferred disco, techno, rap, etc. I make no secret out of this: I considered myself superior to my peers.

In 2004, tragedy stuck the household for the first time - at least, the first time when I was alive. My maternal grandmother died. This wasn't first time I encountered the concept of death, as we have lost several cats before, but this was the first time I came face to face with the death of a fellow human being, especially one so close to me. This even, undoubtedly served as a catalyst for a lot of other events in my life. My maternal grandmother was like the pillar holding the whole family together. Before her death, my alcoholic father's alcoholism was kept moderated. After her death, my father just went all out of his way. Sure, my life had its ups and downs even after her death, but all in all, ever since she has been gone, it has been mostly a downwards spiral.

The aforementioned duality got widened out: we expanded our house, I got my own separate room, and my separate computer. I didn't lack any material goods I desired. But material goods alone don't bring happiness. What awaited me at home was my very own room and very own computer, but what good was that, when I had to dread every evening, knowing that I'll have to go to school in the morning, where I'll be bullied?

But the deaths did not stop in 2004. One year later, my uncle - my father's sister's husband - died, and he was very close to the family, and a very very close friend of my father's. He was the one who made my maternal grandmother's grave, and contributed to the expansion of the house.

In 2008, my paternal grandfather died. One year later, my parents got divorced - due to my father's alcoholism escalating to the point where my mother considered it unbearable -, and two years later, in 2011, my father died as well. In 2018, my maternal grandfather died, then one year later, my other uncle (the husband of one of my father's other sisters) died as well. In the summer of 2020, the last of my grandparents - my paternal grandmother - died, and on the 6th of Januarry, 2021, my cat Longfur - my one and only friend in real-life - also died.

Yes, so far, I emphasized the negatives, when obviously, my life had some ups too, some positive moments, but the overall tendency since 2004 was decline. Before the death of my maternal grandmother, we were very close as a family, and my mother took me and my siblings to visit our cousins all the time. Now, as of 2021, it has been literal years since I last saw any of my cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. The family drifted apart.

Another common thread in my life was not being the master of my own fate. I was always forced to make decisions I just wasn't read to make. "Which high school will you go to? What do you wanna do once you grow up?" - "Uhhh, I dunno, I guess I'll go grammer school..." - "Which college will you go to? What do you wanna do once you grow up?" - "Uhhhh, I dunno, I guess I'll go for Business Information Technology" (even at that time, I was considering Historian as an alternative career choice, but in the end, BIT won). Only now did it become clear to me, that I never really wanted to do anything (besides maybe developing video games), and college only served to extend my childhood.

Mentally, I might not be right either. Ever since 2011, I have been suffering from what seems to be dysthimia (never diagnosed), and both real-life family and online "friends" say that I probably have Asperger's.

But when did things truly go wrong in my life?

26th of June, 2020 - Rainclouds gather around my brains

As I made it clear in the previous few paragraphs, I wasn't truly happy even before the aforementioned dreaded day.

That day, was a birthday of mine. What should have been a happy day for me, was the day of tragedy that accelerated the downwards spiral of my life.

Everyone talks about how Covid-19 completely ruined their lives, how everything went wrong as soon as the pandemic hit, or as soon as the lockdowns came, but I wasn't affected negatively. If anything, I welcomed the fact that education and exams became online, given how introverted I am, and how I hate commuting. Everything from the convenience of my room? Sign me up!

But on the dreaded day, I had an exam. And I failed. And it was from a subject, at which I already failed five times. Sixth failure meant, that I'm out - kicked out of college, forced to re-join if I intend to get a diploma.

From what did I fail? I failed from "Expert Systems", a subject involving neural systems, fuzzy logic and so-called "expert systems". I was expected to learn the material like a poem, learn it from the heart, something I am incapable of. I am a software developer, not a reciter of poems.

And so, on that day, my life effectively ended. I'm not suicidal. I'm not going to end my own life (at least, not feeling like doing that, as of the time of writing this article), but I am already dead inside. I won't end my own life - not by my own hand, at least - but if something comes to end it, I won't protest. That day, I lost the will to live, and things haven't improved one bit since.

At that day, I might as well have died, because what followed, was nothing but negativity. I re-applied to college, but I also had to get a job. Two months later, my paternal grandmother died, which I already mentioned. Then, five months later, my cat died. Three months later, here I am writing this "article", thinking to myself - When did it all go so wrong?

When will the rainclouds go away? Why won't the rainclouds go away?

Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

Right now, I begrudgingly do my day job on the weekdays, and am supposed to be studying on the weekend, but just cannot get myself to do it, out of inability to sacrifice free time. I am planning to learn Android programming to develop some kind of app that will earn me some money on the side, but I never get around actually doing that. No matter what am I forced to do, all workdays leave me exhausted of my energy, not even capable of relaxing and having fun. I spend my free time staring at the computer screen, constantly looking at the clock. The sight of time passing makes me want to cry, but I lost the ability to weep and emit tears a long time ago - so all I can do is just to do the thousand-yard stare.

This is why I am hoping that the economy will collapse. This is why I am cheering for the day robots take my job and force the implementation of Universal Basic Income. This is why I defend scammers. I don't want to return to the pre-pandemic world - it was hell for me.

Less than one year of being a worker, and I already resent every single aspect of it.

Am I lazy? Probably, but can't really blame me if I don't really have much interest in what I'm doing.

Am I spoiled? Probably - most people of my age already have almost a decade of work experience behind themselves, while I had an extended 28-year childhood, and just can't get broken in.

Am I depressed? - Well, take your guesses. Mental health isn't taken seriously at all in Hungary, and everyone just considers me lazy. Whatever my mental condition is, even if I'm diagnosed, it definitely won't warrant any sort of welfare or liberation from wageslavery.

I desperately need to take a break from life and re-think everything, but doing so would mean burning through my savings. If I got diagnosed with some kind of disability and got officially recognized as unfit-for-work, I'd feel guilty for possibly taking the money from those who are genuinely disabled, despite all my previous talks about being an egoist who only cares about himself.

I want either a Basic Income - so I can quit my job and re-think my life - or the collapse of the global economical system, so that I can invent myself on a leveled playing field.

Most people want to be rich to buy a big villa or a super nice car. I want to be rich to be liberated from wageslavery. My monthly salary is 200 000 HUF (666 USD) - but as I said, that's a bit deceptive, and functionally it's a lot more than that - and for 50 years, that would be 120 000 000 HUF (400 062 USD) - that's all I'd need. I want to be rich to finally have some breathing room, re-think my life, and discover what I actually like doing and want to do.

Obviously, that amount of money won't just fall into my lap out of nowhere. So here I stand, sentenced to this dreadful fate.

And so, here am I...

... broken, yet refusing to be broken in. Still standing, yet refusing to stand in line.

I was never truly the master of my own fate, and the current system won't allow me to be. Something needs to happen to activate my survival instincts and make me invent myself.

Every night, I think to myself - When will this nightmare end?