I’ve been approved for LTD just recently. Hooray. But I feel horribly Empty and without purpose
I was a workaholic and super ambitious from high school to university and corporate job. Now I can’t even get up some days.
my main motivation were finances and academics but it’s kinda taken the backseat now that I’m bed bound most days.
What the hell do I do with the rest of my life?
it’s a huge shock to me that I’m not sure what to do.
Fellow workaholic here with no good answers. It’s a pretty pathetic life to be honest. And I’m not allowed to volunteer while on LTD so that’s a second big hole in my life.
I sat down and wrote out the things in my life that are important to me. One priority is maintaining the relationships that you have because it’s especially difficult to establish new ones. If you are bedridden it will be tougher, but phone and video calls are still available. And I added in the little activities that I could do. For me personally it’s essential to my mental health to get out of the house, so even going and sitting at a cafe was very helpful. It gives you a good chance to marvel at all the people who seemingly don’t work regular work hours. But in terms of actually finding something meaningful to do, I haven’t answered that question yet.
I’m super sorry to hear you haven’t found anything to fill that void. I think there is like a window of energy in a single day that I have, and I’m not sure what more I can do on it besides chores…
i try hiking to different parks, but it’s just not the same as seeing the results of day to day consistency….
Former workaholic here as well. I started off with a very negative viewpoint and then over time began to see the positives because we all have one life and we have choices to make with what are very material Health restrictions that we all face
When I was working I used to be so inspired by the really old people in Japan who would work 20-hour days to make ramen noodles to sell at the side of the road. I always thought to myself how lucky I was to be making what I was making while working from home
As my health got worse I started to mentally tank after going on long-term disability and then I realized that I have a choice to make and how I view my disability is exactly that
A choice
Many people right now go to work 9:00 to 5:00 and have stupid commutes and barely have any time to see their kids or to be kind to their spouse. Disabled people like us get paid to do nothing. So many people out there are struggling with medical issues with no form of insurance or financial help.
I choose to count my blessings as opposed to count my hardships. I’m not saying life is great because it clearly isn’t but life is far from bad.
Since then my focus is on how do I die with zero and what do I want to spend that insurance money on. I know that that is coming from a position of privilege but what I won’t share here are all the things took while I was working to make sure I was financially stable. This last little bit has given me a little bit of happiness in life
It’s funny that you mentioned Japan. Historically they had a culture of employing people for life. Since the company terminating employment was culturally unacceptable, they came up with a way to get unwanted employees to quit. The way was to pay them while giving them nothing to do. It’s the doing nothing that is a curse for me.