/jp/ - Otaku Culture

So this is my story. I studied computer science cause I wanted to make videogames. But it turns out I don't really like programming or math. I like stories. I couldn't find a job making stories for videogames, so I started working for a famously "cool" company. But, to be frank, I find computer officework awful and inhuman. In time, I developed depression. I started to not have energy for anything, and to obsess over death. I was diagnosed and given antidepressants. After treatment, I didn't mind programming much anymore. Life was fine, I was productive, and I worked every day like a proper little servant, scoring promotions & making our CEO overlords ever richer.

Then I was suddenly downsized.

I couldn't afford my SNRI (Venlafaxine) anymore so I stopped almost cold-turkey, rationing my reserves. It was painful. After I got it out of my system, however, I for the first time realized how pointless the office was, and how it was my job that made me depressed in the first place. Suddenly the idea of sitting in front of a computer debugging crap code all my life felt like a fate worse than death.

Fast-forward a few years. I'm now not on meds and not depressed. I'm taking a second degree, on Japanese literature—every day being praised and encouraged to read the same kind of stuff I had to hide during work. Was my job in fact awful, so that I needed chemical intervention to tolerate it? Or am I a pussy who can't put up with a real job like everyone, and the antidepressants fix my defective brain so that I become healthy and functionally normal? On meds, I don't mind a lifetime of work; without meds, I'd rather give up the career and live next to art and beauty. It's like you're two entirely different persons. I chose to be this one.