About two years ago I stared into the void. I didn’t have any real problems in life, but my job was boring as hell and my colleagues were always constantly negative, depressing and whined about everything, which affected my mindset after months upon months of that.

Freshly out of university, the job (which I couldn’t leave due to contacts) sucked out my every hope and dream of having a fulfilling career where I’d have an impact on the world. I felt so useless. To make matters worse I fell in love at that time.

One day I vaguely felt bad, got home, sat down and started crying like crazy. Life felt so meaningless. Not my life specifically, but life as a concept. I could change my life, but to what purpose? I sincerely felt regret for ever having been born and existence felt like a cruel joke, it was all vanity, pain, and at the end you die without even feeling the relief of it being over since you would be gone. It was a feeling of meaninglessness where even doing something about it was as meaningless as doing nothing.

The next day I had another crying session, didn’t eat anything the whole day as well. And in the evening I remembered how Seneca wrote that nothing bad happens to good people since those “bad” moments are the only time we get to show our virtues. Didn’t really fix the basic problem of meaninglessness, but it did reinvigorate me. Reading Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” also got me to handle the absurd better. But the moment I got out of the whole ordeal altogether was about 8 months later when I realized that I was very much pushed to such a state by my colleagues, and that I yearned for some sort of warmth and comfort from others. But nobody has really ever shined for me, I realized that I had to be my own light and that I should not do things to earn other’s approval, but for me (this does not mean being selfish, according to Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, doing morally good deeds is for the benefit of the doer). I’ve been fine since then.