We all have those moments in our lives where we just want to curl up into a corner with all of the lights off and hyperventilate until we run out of oxygen. Sometimes they last a few weeks, sometimes they last years or decades. If you find yourself in an endless cycle of sadness and self-loathing, or just hate your life but don't feel like doing anything useful about it, here are ten fun-tastic ways to distract yourself from the inevitable pain and suffering!
1. Eating
Gorging yourself is great and is highly fulfilling while you're doing it. Make sure you eat something extremely unhealthy that will make you feel bloated and gross later. It's especially fun to eat food that will destroy your body, like ice cream if you're lactose intolerant, or literally any normal food if you're glucose intolerant. If you're lame like me and are tolerant of everything, then just eat a lot of Taco Bell and your body should reject it like poison because their meat isn't even really meat. It's like 30% sand or something. I read about it online once.
2. Memes
Memes are always fun to browse, but the absolute best time to do it is when you're too sad to do things like get up and go downstairs or go outside and take a walk, and too awake to crawl into bed and sleep. Memes work great to get you laughing when you're in a bad mood, especially if the meme is about depression and self-deprecation. If you're too sad to even laugh at memes, then it's at least a good way to force your brain to think about something other than your self-loathing for once. It works extra well if you're doing it at three or four in the morning with all the lights off in the house and everyone else asleep, because it'll emphasize what you should be doing (sleeping), but are too shit brained to get off your computer and do (especially if you have a loft bed and you have to climb a ladder to get to bed like me).
3. Binge watching TV Shows
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Binge watching shows on Netflix or Hulu is a great distraction from your sadness, especially if it has way too many seasons like Supernatural or Grey's Anatomy, or the episodes are an hour long like Sherlock or House of Cards. Just make sure it's nothing too relatable, or else you might find yourself sobbing in your room alone. How embarrassing!
4. Binge watching TV Shows made for Kids
Watching television shows made for small children is a fun way to reminisce about a time when things were simpler and not confusing and messy like your life is now. Everything is almost always happy in these shows, and the problems are light and innocent. If you don't know if the show is for children or not, here's a good rule of thumb: if it's animated, it's for children. Some great shows that are strictly for children but are still fun to watch, even though they're made for children, are "Steven Universe," "Gravity Falls," "Bob's Burgers," "Bojack Horseman," "Rick and Morty." I highly recommend all of those shows (especially the last two, which are best watched with other kids. Because they're for kids.)
5. Regression
Remember when you used to play with that Rubik's Cube in ninth grade, which is now collecting dust on your desk? Why don't you pick it up again? Picking up old habits and hobbies that you haven't done since you were in middle school is a great way to cope with your current life situation because it will (hopefully) remind you of a time when you were innocent and happy before you became an adult and everything fell to shit. This only works if you actually had a happy childhood, otherwise skip this one.
6. Pretend to Be Emo
You're probably not emo, because no one likes emo people. But since you're depressed, you might as well pretend to be. Tell all your friends that you're emo now. Make a sarcastic 'Coming Out as Emo' video with My Chemical Romance playing in the background. Paint your nails black. Get a new hairstyle that covers one of your eyes. If your hair isn't black, then dye it black. If it is, dye it red or blue. Start wearing only black, even in the summer, so that strangers get really uncomfortable when you stand near them. Use it as a front to write depressing poetry without concerning people. Just remember, you're not actually emo. You're just pretending, so it's okay.
7. Start a new hobby
Starting a new hobby like drawing or playing an instrument is an excellent way to pretend you're doing something productive when you're actually just keeping your mind from burrowing into insanity with a relaxing, repetitive task. Make sure you're not too good, otherwise you might actually find happiness and fulfillment, and this list would actually be helpful, which is counterintuitive. We don't want that!
8. Humor
If you're like me and also literally every other person on the Earth and you love to laugh, then start making humor out of your shitty life! Create funny memes that make people laugh about your suicidal thoughts. Write cynical "Top 10" lists that make light of your depression. You might be miserable, but at least someone else is laughing about it!
9. Talk to yourself
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Talking to yourself is a great way to fill in the horrible silence with constant nonsensical mutterings about how you should probably clean up your room, but you know you're not going to because it's too overwhelming and messy and confusing to look at. It especially works if you invent a person in your mind to talk back to you. It's almost like having a real friend to talk to, except that most people think you're insane. But whatever you do, don't talk to a therapist about your feelings. That would be admitting to another real life person that you have an actual problem, and they might help you make your life better! Who want's that?
10. Study Neuroscience
Neuroscience is a great subject to study if you hate yourself and/or other people, because it allows you to distance yourself from others by looking at them through a microscope like ants instead of treating them like real people with feelings. It allows you to drive others away with your condescending explanation that things like love and happiness don't really exist, that they're just a series of hormones and neuron firings, and are made up concepts to help others sleep well at night. You're not stupid anymore like they are. You know better. You also never sleep well at night.
This may have been a thinly veiled call for help. It may have been a badly disguised projection of my own emotions. This may have even been completely detached from my emotional well-being, and written purely for satirical purposes. Whatever it is, I hope you found these reasons as useless as you expected. Have a nice day.
