I think if life had a single, defining motto, it would be “F*** Your Feelings.” In my humble experience, when life has a truth to teach you, it does not care at all about a soft delivery. It comes and smacks you in the face with the truth so you don’t forget. Judging by this Reddit thread, it seems I’m not alone.

1. Losing Friends

I am 34, and when I was 19, I had a friend for years. One day, my friend must have just decided to not be friends with me any more. Stopped returning calls, stopped wanting to hang out. There was never an event that triggered this. Just something they must have decided. It hurt my feelings a lot, and as it happened a couple more times in life, I had to just accept that some people just don’t like being my friend.

2. No Motivation

I am everything that is wrong with me. Any and all dissatisfaction I have with my life stems from my consistent inability to change it. I could be doing better in college, go to the gym more, network more, read more, and the only thing holding me back is that I have no motivation. I don’t care enough about myself to do anything.

3. Can’t Help Everyone

You have to subconsciously dehumanize the people outside the sphere of your consideration, because to be constantly aware and empathetic of the sheer human suffering all around you is to go mad.

All you can do is help who you can.

4. Undeserved Misery

There are people in this world who are going to live ruined, miserable lives they don’t deserve, and there is really nothing I can do about it.

5. Summertime Sadness

Summer vacation is over for me. Forever. I still have that feeling this time of year that I’m due three months off. Where every day is a long day outside doing what I want to do, drinking out of hose spigots and dancing in sprinklers. Until it starts to get dark and you know you should head home for dinner but you play.

Just. One. More. Game.

Then your mom calls you in and you head home before the orange sky turns purple then black. And the crickets and frogs sing louder and louder.

Now I work, I’m not a teacher, and I won’t have any of that again until I retire. And when I retire I doubt it will mean the same thing to me without the nine months of school/work preceding summertime.

6. So Much Selfishness

Many people are not interested in reciprocation; they are interested in reaping the benefits of any kind of relationship they have with you, be that emotional, financial, physical, etc.

The sadder truth is that most are completely unaware of their own selfishness, or simply do not care what your needs may be. This means that you can be kind and try to help everyone you meet, but not everyone will be the same to you.

7. Not The One

Just because you think someone is “the one” doesn’t mean they think you are.

8. Life’s Not Fair

Life will never be fair. You can do the right thing for your entire life and still get crapped on around every corner.

9. I Repeat, Life Is NOT Fair

That death is forever and life isn’t fair.

Like, clearly I know that, and everyone knows that, but I had a cousin who was literally the salt of the earth, give you the shirt off his back guy. He was a paramedic, always helping people. He looked after his mom his whole life. He lived with her, took care of her, did absolutely everything for her. She died last Christmas at 92. It was a blessing in disguise, she had had a few strokes and ended up in a home and she said that she did not want to keep living like that. She also had been diagnosed with Huntington’s, and so had my cousin.

Fast forward to Easter this year, my cousin was heading from his house to his sisters (like a 20 min drive away) and had a head on collision with another car. Other guy walked away, but my cousin took the brunt. They turned off life support the next day. It was so bad that they had a cloth over his face when he was on life support so family didn’t see how bad his face was. We thought when his mom died that he would get to live life for himself kinda thing, but he got four months of life before it was stolen from him.

10. No Moral Compass

That some people do not care if they screw your life over. They’re too selfish to feel remorse or care about the consequences, or they’ll gladly do anything for a quick laugh.

11. No Rewards

Growing up I was abandoned by my dad and neglected by my mom. Knowing this, my mom still treated me like a maid. I ran away, worked several jobs just to graduate, always went hungry, wrote my thesis by hand, and was always alone when I got severely sick.

People would always tell me that all the suffering is just the world preparing me for something greater. Life will have so much goodness in store for me because of how much I’ve suffered. That’s not necessarily true.

Sometimes bad people will continue to have comfortable lives and good people will continue to suffer.

12. No Saviors

The only knight in shining armor I’m ever going to have, is myself. Nobody is ever going to save me. I am not special enough to save.

I’ve gotten out of a lot of bad situations though, thanks to the above.

13. All Wrong

My parents just aren’t capable of being the parents they should’ve been. They aren’t going to wake up one day and realise all they’ve done wrong. It’s never going to change.

14. Karma Lied

Karma doesn’t exist and life is unfair. Some people will have all the bad things happen to them even though they’re good people. And some of the worst people ever will live a happy and fulfilling life, maybe even because they screwed other people over, and nothing will ever happen to “correct” that imbalance.

15. Vested Interests

Most people in positions of power really don’t care about the people they are supposed to be representing.

These ‘leaders’ will actively work to sabotage other people who are competent and stop good ideas if those ideas are not their own. Alternatively, they will steal ideas and claim them if the ideas work.

For them, looking good is far more important than human rights or humanity.

16. No Going Back

That the mistakes I made when I was younger will stick with me and I can’t go back. I can’t change the program I went in, I can’t get back the years and thousands I wasted on a program that made me feel awful.

17. Distant Strangers

That when you and your siblings grow up, you become separate families, and eventually you all feel like strangers.

18. Pretty Much

Life sucks, friends leave you, people you love die, WW2 Nazi and Japanese death camps actually happened, not just in text books, Soviet Union happened, people are not what they seem, college is expensive.

19. Motivating and Depressing

There is no cosmic teeter-totter. People tend to have this weird idea that life is in balance. That there’s equal good and bad, that there’s a quota to maintain. The “I can get away with X because I did Y today”. A moral version of cheating with your diet.

Someone winning the lottery doesn’t somehow negate another person being gunned down a town over.

This is double-edged. On the one hand, you can’t do good to get rid of the bad in this world. It doesn’t work that way. On the flip side, understanding this has made it far easier to do good, because, as mentioned, there’s no quota, and good is still good even if it doesn’t undo the bad. It’s still crappy because I’m constantly aware that I can’t bust my butt all day every day and save everyone, and someone somewhere is going to grow up scared, scarred, and jaded no matter how much good karma I put out there.

It’s both motivating and depressing at the same time.

20. Average Joe

I am not good at much. Average at a lot of things. Not motivated enough to improve.

21. Forgotten

That most people don’t really amount to anything and just live in the background of the world and are forgotten when they die.

22. Everyone Dies

That my parents are gonna eventually pass away. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

23. Unhappy Marriage

My wife is not happy with the way our life is together and one day she will have to leave.

24. Circle of Life

I know this might sound stupid, but the thing that depresses me the most is the realisation that everyone I’ve ever loved and will love will someday die.

I remember the first time my mom told me that she would die some day. I was a toddler, and this is one of my earliest memories because of the complete disbelief and devastation I felt. I cried for days – because imagining a world where my mom no longer existed wasn’t something that I could reasonably deal with.

When my favourite uncle was diagnosed with cancer and sent me letters, telling me to remember him and not to visit him in hospital because he wanted me to think of him like he used to be; dancing and laughing. I remember thinking ‘What do you mean, remember?’ I made him a ‘Get well’ soon card and waited for him to come home but he never did and everyone cried when I mentioned his name.

When my nana was diagnosed with cancer and had it recede only to come back with unconquerable force, and, now, with doctors saying that my mom isn’t taking enough care of herself and might not live to see her grandchildren–

The idea of getting old is still so foreign to me. I’m 23 this year, my parents are in their early fifties and my grandparents are nearing 80. I see the people around me age, seemingly shrinking and fading around the edges as each year makes itself known and I just can’t wrap my head around it.

I took a picture of my parents the other day and looking at it now I realise that I have this superimposed image in my mind of how they look – mom with smiling eyes and unruly brown hair and my dad with a constant grin, but when I put my glasses on and really look I can see the wrinkles that weren’t there before, the way my dad’s going bald and they stoop just a little lower than before.

I just can’t make sense of the fact that one day they won’t be here. That one day I’ll be the one using a walking stick and asking my grandkids to tell me which uno card is green and which is yellow because I can’t tell the difference.

I just can’t imagine it.

25. Hard Life

The most depressing truth I’ve come to so far is that I’m 36, I am not a home owner, I’m helping my wife raise her four other children while we raise our 1 year old son, all the while I pay child support for my daughter that I never see. I have basically screwed my life up.

26. Lost Intellect

That after my accident, I will never be the same smart quick witted person I used to be. All I can do now is try everyday to adapt to the world around me the best I can.

27. “I Will Fail.”

If I died tomorrow my friends would not notice for a while. No matter how hard I try or how hurt she makes me, my mother will never apologize. I will not achieve my dreams. I will fail.

28. Some Will Die

It doesn’t matter how much care I put into them, when I foster kittens from the animal shelter, some will die. They’ll go limp in my hands in the car and my dogs won’t understand why I keep taking a kitten and not bring it back.

They were born on the streets to a sickly stray mother, and they will die before they get a chance unless I spend a couple grand per kitten, with nothing but a lifetime of medication and half fulfilling lives to look forward to, if they’re extremely lucky.

I expected this in a way when my wife and I started, but I just lost a third one from bad reactions to a vaccine, or maybe parvo. I don’t know. Went catatonic, and had a heart attack at the vet.

It doesn’t get easier. But some of them will survive and get good homes.

29. Lost Potential

There’s probably a person with the potential of being smarter than Einstein, but that person is busy working all day to feed parents/children because they were born poor and never got the chance to go to a school or university.

30. Brain Damage

Depression caused me brain damage and I am not as intelligent as I was before I had it.

I am attempting to regain my old intelligence though, through a variety of ways.

31. Toxic Family

That family can be a terrible burden. My mom and my brother are living testaments to this. Both are a waste of life and I wish I could get back all the time, money, and nice things I did for them back. At least I learned a lesson about not having to accept toxicity from family and that it’s okay to cut them off permanently.

32. Ok…

Probably that whole “heat death of the universe” thing.

It will eventually get to the point where the all the viable energy in the universe will peter out and it will be impossible to sustain any life. All life will die out. All stars will collapse into black holes. Then, billions and billions of years after that, all of the black holes will dissipate and the only thing left in the freezing, infinite void will be a few photons floating around trying to latch on to the other photons.

That’s pretty depressing.

33. Totally Average

I am average and I always will be. I will have an average life with an average income, get married, have kids and die. That is okay not everyone is meant to have a special and fulfilling life. Not everyone gets what they want out of it. Whoever said follow your dreams had a backing of lots of money and were attractive. There are exceptions but I am the rule.