It's all so tiresome

1. Get a job that's < 40 hours of work.  Even 50 hours a week is two less hours of sleep or free time every weekday.  That's not normal.

2. Don't blame dopamine.  Dopamine is the chemical what makes you want to repeat an event you enjoyed.  Sounds like you need to get some real hobbies because the only things you've enjoyed recently is Netflix.

3. Nobody's saying you need to participate in hookup culture.  Just say 'no hookups/fwb' on your Tinder or whatever and nobody will bother you, especially since mostly its the guys trying to hook up.  I don't see what's wrong with dating apps themselves since you can get matches while sleeping or doing work while also meeting girls offline

You are depressed don't kid yourself. Stop jacking off and go make something of yourself, when in doubt, work harder. 

You seem overwhelmed. The easiest way to fight with modern times is to detach yourself from the chaos out there (see it as Me vs. the World). Live by your own principles and values and you will be satisfied with life no matter in each period you live.

I do kind of agree with you that dating seems to just be a shit show now a days.  Not really sure if there is a way to make it better as there is a lot of sifting that needs to occur, which is just a lot of work.  

Understanding the dopamine vs serotonin in your brain would probably help and why finding balance is a tricky chemistry experiment. I don’t have a catch all solution but here’s a few ideas I have on this topic:

1. Step 0 is making sure you’re not clinically depressed. I’m not saying you are nor that you are even likely to be, but having a litmus test is crucial to understanding what steps to take moving forward. Imagine your ankle hurts, you’d want a doc to make sure it’s not fractured or broken first. Knowing I have depression has made me approach things in a far better way, personally.

1. One of my friends summed this up nicely, “If I had one podcast to listen to forever, it would be Tim Ferris.” It covers pretty much everything you need in life. Want more on the health side? Andrew Huberman is also great.

2. Maintain a regular fitness schedule (not just exercise, but also diet and sleep). Without these, everything else will feel like shit. Do something sustainable.

3. Practice gratitude. I know it’s cliché bs but it really does work. Huberman has a great episode on the actual neuroscience behind this. For whatever reason I just don’t get into journaling, so I have a whiteboard that simply says “This week I am grateful for:” and I fill it out each week.

4. Try to navigate your career in the way you want, but also not let it consume you and find value outside of work as well (NOTE- I’m not saying hate your job and find happiness after hours, you should find value in both work and outside of it. But an imbalance in your entire life being your career, or entire happiness after hours is a recipe for disaster).

5. Another cliche one, but fall in love with the process of improvement. What do you do at the top of the mountain? You take some photos, look at the views, relish in the moment. After that moment… you hike back down. And you find another mountain. If you don’t find a way to love the hike up the mountain, you’ll be miserable for a majority of your life. This is all figurative, but also real if you do want to hike.

I can show you the stats if you don't believe me

interested 

I've heard the club scene got destroyed since launch of tinder. 

OP I felt the same way. I decided if I couldn't make myself happier at that point of time, I wanted to make others happy so I joined some charities and gave back. Made me realize more about myself and I was able to do a lot of self reflecting as I got to know others. 

It's a job, it's supposed to suck a lot of the time. It's not there to give you some sort of all-encompassing life satisfaction, it's a transaction where you sell time in your life in exchange for money.

On your last point, consider Solomon, a mighty king who was the absolute wealthiest man of his time. He had more silver and gold than anyone, and even a harem, but it brought him no happiness. It burned him, and only other people could enjoy his fortune. This is because hoarding extreme wealth will rot you from the inside, while giving to others will do the exact opposite. There is much to read of this in Ecclesiastes, which is ancient wisdom literature from the Old Testament. The entire book is a depressed rich man realizing what really matters in life.

If you have nothing but materialism then you will find it hard to find satisfaction in wealth. We are workers, even workers with college educations and nice white collar jobs, still workers. We are still subservient to a master class, the owners of corporations, and the state is subject to them. Wisdom makes you more powerful than all of them, and wisdom brings you true meaning and happiness. Wisdom is from God, like all things, and you will not find complete satisfaction in the world.

I sincerely believe that true satisfaction can only be found in God. That's my two cents, take it or leave it.

Stop comparing yourself to others. Stop comparing yourself to the grind. Stop listening to the "take no days off" folks. Stop listening to the "zyr/zyp" folks.

If you don't want to be addicted to streaming services, then reduce / remove them from your life. If you don't like that "muh society" is addicted, find people who aren't. They exist.

Just chill out and live your life. Find something that is meaningful to you (family, religion, etc.) and take care of that.

All these thoughts culminated in the year 1999: The Matrix, Fight Club and Office Space.

What is the connection? Soul-crushing cubicle jobs and lack of meaning in life. 

>We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.'" ~ Tyler Durden

Cubicle Life:

Life is just one giant Hedonic Treadmill, no matter how great and happy you think you are you slowly return back to zero.. you can never sustain life's highs. Social media is always comparing your life to other people's highlight reels (that aren't true), and this ultimately brings you down.

Not even the happy go lucky Russ Hanneman can stay happy forever, falling out of the 3 Comma Club drove him to depression: 

https://youtu.be/s9Bg4UU76so

Keep it simple. They say we all need three things for a happy life: Someone to love. Something to do. Something to look forward to.

>The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it’s impossible to turn back.~ Henry Rollins

Well people are taught to strive for 'success' in school which is probably just a cushy 9-5 corporate job. Most people like myself found out that I did it just to please parents/others and it's not really what I wanted. Pursue what you actually care about vs being comfortable. I understand that not everyone is priveleged enough to afford pursuing their dreams but such is life

Dude you’ve gotta get on the immigrant mindset

This is a daunting task, but this feeling is highly familiar. There’s this author known as David Foster Wallace, infamous for his work Infinite Jest, outside of literary circles or modern PhD students he isn’t incredibly well known (unless you were in your mid 20s to late 40s when the book came out), who I have found describes this feeling in the perfect manner and I have grown highly attached to his work because it is the greatest describer of what modernity, or better yet, post-modernity is like (although this isn’t a doctoral thesis, so pick whichever you wish). As a “banker” I am annoyed by how much interest I took (and still take) in his literature especially because at first it just sounded like the usual yuppy, over-educated elitist garbage that sounds deep for the sake of sounding deep, but I read some his less elaborate and verbose works (Good Old Neon) and his critiques of what midwestern society is like (The View From Ms. Thompson’s House), among others, and found them to be highly insightful into the feeling that you are describing.

You, much like myself, and many others in the investment banking, law, white collar type employment realm feel this anti-gusto, this sinking feeling that something is constantly off or abject or just plain incorrect. Every day I wake up, and I am blessed to be able to have my job be essentially doing nothing of practical productive value (reference Richard Werner for how banks actually extract value from the financial system), yet being well-renumerated for it. I feel deeply thankful to the bank that gave me a full time contract, I do not simp for them but I am genuinely grateful because at the very young age at which I’m at, I have opportunities and prospects much greater than 99% of what the people in my home country have (and 99% in America as well).

Despite that, I got to America at a very young age and got incorporated into American culture very early on. I grew up on Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, iCarly, I watched Friends multiple times, etc. I absorbed much of the mass-media, popular shows that produced the modernist non-culture that America is composed of. Every young, college aged girl in America has the ‘white woman lights’ somewhere in their room (the neon, Christmas light-like ornaments), she has the ‘Live, Love, Laugh’ sign or some variant of it, she has 100 throw pillows on her bed that she never uses, she holds ‘strong opinions’ on subjects which she barely understands, etc. similarly, her male equivalent thinks it’s edgy to look at jokes which have the n-word, they like guns and support the second amendment despite likely never needing one, they ‘don’t mean to be racist but…,’ they listen to trap music despite paying $50 for a gram of weed, etc. many of us know people like this and might even be like this ourselves.

Entering college further induced within me this psychosis of non-culture where everyone thought they were different but were actually identical. Some might say ‘every country in Europe or Asia is like that,’ but the difference is that it isn’t as manufactured nor commercialized as it is in the United States. Having outside awareness and having traveled a lot as a kid throughout what was essentially badly run, corrupt countries (corrupt meaning non-Western liberal ideals and constant bribery), I had a nice basis for comparison. I drew many conclusions but chief among those was how Americans truly don’t get it, but it isn’t their fault. Americans don’t understand how blessed they are because they have no frame of reference; when I talk to someone from Kansas, they simply can’t imagine a world where Waste Management doesn’t come around that week or where 401k accounts do not support them at least a little into retirement. The real, non-US world (the other 96.5% of the world population), even in European countries, is substantially worse.

But why do we feel like this, regardless of all our blessings? Well, partly because of the individualistic lie of the pursuit of happiness; we are given the right to pursue it, yet we misconstrue it with the promise of it. This is the stereotype of millennials feeling special and feeling different, yet all being the same because they have no true culture. In college, I met so many people with the same three generic tattoos in, give or take, the same spot, drinking the same coffees, holding the same pseudo-radical (radical to them) popular political opinions (‘racism is bad,’ ‘women need more rights,’ ‘dictators are bad,’ etc.). Americans are, as I found, a highly benevolent and amiable group of people, but deeply mistaken in their perception of everything. Their innocence and naivete will likely be their downfall; to think that tweeting something or buying ethnic food or pretending to understand a group of people that you are severely disconnected from is a noble (to them) rationale, but a lost cause.

What makes America an amazing country (and it is an amazing country if you immigrated here and know what the rest of the world is like, outside of hotel resorts in Cancun and outside of your Kenyan retreat camp’s hostel that you visited for two weeks during college) economically and opportunistically is not what would make it an amazing country culturally. I often say the old Republicans lost their grip because they believed that making America thrive economically was enough to make it thrive wholistically, but they now face themselves with a culture-less, spiritless abomination of constant identity crisis that has led to a behavioral revolt (excess social liberalism and a ubiquitous (yet mis-aligned) desire for communism among young people).

As a find myself with a contract to work for a ‘big bad corporation’, I feel privileged to be able to do so and I worked tirelessly to get to this point because I knew what would happen to me otherwise. This immigrant mentality, as someone else said, is the one that will allow you to appreciate (what truly little) you have.

On more practical manners, do what few Americans do and culture yourself. I mean this unironically, there is more to a culture than the food or knowing someone from a certain country. Perhaps read up on some history, stop watching Netflix, partake in positive hobbies that improve your feeling for the rest of the world.

Partaking in the virtue-signaling excess that overruns college campuses is poisonous, because it simultaneously makes you hate others while reinforcing a lack of understanding. Popper tells us to thrive for an Open Society, one without borders and with cooperation. We are very far from achieving something like that, but the first step towards true equality and feeling better has and will always start on the individual level.

Foster Wallace thrived for religion all his life, but struggled to accept it. I see it a lot as the modern struggle many guys (like us, especially) have, which is the false desire for a traditional relationship with a woman that is actually just a submissive relationship with a woman on the pretense that it is ‘conservative,’ i.e. you want her to be Christian/Catholic, but only for the benefit of having her be a virgin and none of this even matters if she is ugly.

Modernity is complex, scary and obnoxious, but only for us. We are privileged with our lifestyles and because of that, we are given too much time to observe, to think and to wonder. We fear losing it and that stops us from enjoying it. It is natural to want to have a problem constantly. Think of how many fake rebels there are in America; kids who grew up in suburbia with no practical struggles nor real problems (poverty, hunger, etc.) spitting out that they ‘had body issues growing up’ or ‘were bullied’ and that’s why they aren’t high achievers or why they can’t even do the bare minimum sometimes and they end up flying off the rails. When humans has no problems, they proceed to create problems for themselves. This is the unfortunate truth of things.

What I recommend is to constantly distract yourself. Have your goals and your aspirations, but stop looking at things so bleakly, it will only bring you (and me, and the rest of us) pain… Pray to God perhaps.

Reverend William Sloane Coffin used to say “when you win the rat race, you’re still a rat!” Felt similarly in college and looked down on all my friends who went to Wall Street at the time. Now? Well with student loans, marriage, kids on the way, aging parents… I see they had a point…

Instead of the trodden Ivy—>IB—>PE—>H/S—>MF path, I went to an elite divinity school in a uni with a strong business school (Harvard/Yale/Oxford/Chicago) and spent a lot of time in both. I recommend it. You learn a lot about business and finance by understanding how religions work. And vice versa. It’s made me a lot less cynical to learn about what’s really motivating billions of people.

Some recs:

Look up the poem called Ithaca by an Egyptian guy named Cavafy, and then read:

Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life

The Golden Bough

Aion by Carl Jung

The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil by Ernest Becker

And if you make it that far, you’ll be well on your way to being super religious, but for real.

I grind because even if the rewards might not end up being fulfilling, the alternatives are definitely worse. I used to go through these existential crises/thoughts just after college and let's just say when I learnt this lesson the hard way, it stuck. No matter what anyone says, you'll be in a much better place years down the road with a successful career and fuck-you money in the bank than otherwise, with little exception. If nothing else, it gives you choices to shape your life/happiness how you want, and the leverage to make it happen - at a time (older age) when most other people don't have the luxury of choices or the leverage/resources to make shit happen.

Reading posts like this makes me so glad I wasn’t born ugly or fat or short.

We get it dude.

You’re in banking but still can’t get laid.

Sort yourself out, bucko