Sometimes work being the only thing that makes you feel good is not a bad thing, but a result of you not giving up hope, and that the very idea that you can make it someday, and have a normal life like everybody else, excites the hell out of you like no other.

When everything in your life is just not right or as it is supposed to be according to your own standards, when everything in your life is just screwed up, pleasure tends to come most from, almost exclusively from, making progress towards getting your life together or fixing your life, circumstances, and living conditions. Nothing else tends to feel good. It’s not anhedonia, necessarily. You may have it on top of your already existing problems, struggles, and challenges. But even without anhedonia, you still may struggle to feel good or ever find pleasure in any of the activities that has the potential of giving you any sort of pleasure. You may find that only working on your problems makes you feel good. And that nothing else works. So you may lose faith in even trying, if nothing ever feels good or nothing ever can make you feel good. This could be for a reason that is not about you being depressed because of your current situation. It makes sense in this case to not try to fix this problem, because there is no problem with you and pleasure in the first place. Working on fixing your mood issues or mental health struggles at the moment might not work, not because there’s no hope for you or because nothing can ever be of help to your case. It is not because there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like when you can’t force yourself to be good at multi-tasking, not because there’s something wrong with you, but because you can only truly do one thing at a time. You want to get out of the horrible circumstances or situation you’re stuck in, as soon as you can, and you can’t afford any delay when it comes to accomplishing that. Your life is being wasted right in front of your very own eyes, with each and every passing moment you live under such unspeakable and unlivable circumstances. Everybody else out there is living their best life and enjoying themselves like there’s no tomorrow, except for you. And they still have the audacity to complain and make themselves look like they’re miserable, or struggling behind the scenes, and that everything is not sunshine and rainbows as it looks like to the outside observer, contributing significantly to invalidating the real deal suffering you’re going through, and dismissing it as a struggle that everybody has in their own lives, you just don’t know it, because they don’t show it to you. And that’s why no one will ever understand, and even if they do, they’re not coming to help you, because to them, you needing that huge amount of help makes you either a burden or a loser, so you become more of a liability to them that they need to get rid of, or stay the hell away from, and now you have no one to talk to, no one to fully explain what you’re going through to, which makes you have no option but to keep dragging yourself and pushing your body forward because you have no choice. The situation is worse than it looks like to you. You don’t know what feeling good feels like anymore. You don’t know what you’re missing, because you’ve never had it. You never got a chance to have that kind of life. And what you’re missing is not much; it’s just having a normal life, like everybody else.

You are at a point in your life where nothing can make you feel good except getting closer to escaping the toxic situation you’re stuck in. Only getting out of the horrible circumstances or environment you’re trapped in for whatever reason can help in your case. It’s the only thing that can make life or anything there is make any sense. Working on your escape plan is the only thing that makes you come alive.

So you keep doing this with full focus all day long, every single day. But you have been told that this is toxic hustle culture and toxic productivity, so you feel guilty after doing the right thing, after doing the only thing that is right, because you’re not supposed to work all the time. Because you need to rest. Because you’re eventually going to burnout. And you are told that going all in and doing everything in your power and beyond to save yourself is toxic. Toxic masculinity, toxic positivity, toxic productivity, toxic whatever, and you need to slow down to speed up, and you need to fill your cup first, and you need to follow your passion, and you need to do what you love, and you need to stop being busy all the time, and relationships are the most important and most fulfilling thing in life. You just need to pull the plug. You just need to stop working. We’ll justify that somehow later on. We’ll figure something out. We’ll make it look like stopping now is the right decision. We’ll take care of it. We’ll make it look like an accident. And you listen to all that. You listen to people who managed to get everything figured out in a matter of a few months, bypassing any real chance of developing themselves enough to even know what they’re talking about. You listen to people who made it in no time, because they’re hot. And you base the whole decision of whether or not you should keep going like there’s no tomorrow, with disregard to burnout or exhaustion, upon what they think is the way to go. Based upon the words of people who have no real life experience, who never suffered or struggled a day in their whole life, who think that there are no bad people out there, and it’s all because they’re hurt. It’s all because of trauma, and personality cannot be changed, and you are not responsible for how you feel, and you have no free will whatsoever. You put the fate of your whole life in the hands of people who have no idea what they’re talking about, because they seem to be making tons of money easily. You never even pause to think about it. You are working all the time, so your entire self worth is tied to your productivity. You need to unlearn that. It didn’t occur to them that sometimes there is no other way to go about it. There is no other way to make real progress and save yourself. It didn’t occur to them that you might have no choice. It didn’t occur to them that you need to do whatever it takes to end this. You want out of this prison. You want out of this graveyard. You can’t breathe. Somebody help, please! But no one is coming. No one. No one cares. No one gives a damn. To them, you are just a source of negativity and toxic work culture. You stink and they need to get away from you. You’re not their target audience. You’re not their ideal client. You’re just an ideal victim competing in the oppression Olympics.

The only thing that is toxic is letting any of that slow you down. The only thing that is toxic is to let anything stop you from reaching a place where you’re no longer tortured non-stop every single day. The only thing that is toxic is not making it out of there alive as soon as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s okay to want to live. There’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing else to do better than trying to save yourself. There’s nothing else to do, and there’s nothing else to do. And there’s nothing else worth doing.

Move forward with full force, full speed ahead.