A poster who graduated from Kyoto University but quit their job due to depression and is now unemployed and living as a shut-in turned to 5ch’s Newsokku VIP board to ask, “What should I do with my life from here?” Despite their academic credentials, they found no clear path back into society — and the thread filled with a wide range of responses, from blunt “stop making excuses” tough love, to suggestions to start with exercise or light work, to questions about whether they’d ever seen a psychiatrist. The poster met most suggestions with “I can’t,” repeatedly insisting they’d hit their limit physically and mentally.
No source of income.
if I had to say one thing: quit making excuses. You've got the wrong idea somewhere — acting like you're the only one struggling, like you're the only one with no energy and no stamina.
Every ordinary salaryman out there feels like crap too, and once you hit middle age nobody's got stamina — that's just normal.
Knees and back wrecked, barely able to stand packed trains, and still somehow dragging themselves to work.
Yeah, I know that — I went through that phase too. But I need to become able to endure it again.
I'm doing it.
But I'm not improving at all.
How many years have you been at it?
How many hours a day?
Six months. Two hours a day.
Come back after three years.
And if you've got spare time, do five hours a day.
Five hours a day — what does that even look like in practice?
Nobody actually does that much.
Worked for five years, broke down mentally, fell into NEET-hood.
What did you do for those five years?
Run 2 hours in the morning.
Run 2 hours at noon.
Run 1 hour at night.
No breaks.
If I had that kind of stamina I wouldn't be struggling like this in the first place.
How are you even able to run that much?
nobody but yourself has come up this whole thread,
which tells me you never had a friend to rely on.
I've never had a single friend in my entire life.
Not one.
Just a research job.
What was your field?
I'd rather not say.
You don't stop just because you're tired.
Stopping when you're tired is exactly why your stamina never grows.
Push past your limit — Mega Evolve already (a Pokémon reference for a breakthrough transformation).
No, it's impossible.
Just running until I'm tired is seriously brutal — my brain literally orders me to stop thinking.
I force myself to keep moving anyway.
Asperger's, adjustment disorder, and depression are confirmed.
There might be more on top of that.
So none of that's actually been diagnosed, then.
Being cut off from society is itself the root cause of depression. That feeling of not being needed by anyone is genuinely hard on a person.
Not possible.
I genuinely don't even have the ability to hold down a part-time job.
Otherwise someone with my education wouldn't have ended up like this.
Fine, okay then. I won't post anymore. If chatting in this thread and having people say "I get it" made you feel a bit better, that's fine — I won't say anything else.
I'm only saying this because I already know it's never going to get better.
Could you not manage supermarket stocking work?
You go early in the morning and you're back by around noon, so you'd have the rest of the day free.
Then just walk for an hour, don't stop. If you feel like you've got even a little stamina left, break into a run.
Well, that's exactly what I'm already doing.
You've got to at least try it once.
Nobody nails anything perfectly right from the start.
I only do part of the housework — just cleaning and laundry.
Why not do all of it?
Because I can't.
I'm always surprised when people casually say they "can't" do housework. If you genuinely can't, wouldn't a group home be the best option?
In cities there are even ones filled almost entirely with hikikomori residents.
Though I bet you'll refuse anyway.
You might be surprised — the education you already have could actually be working heavily in your favor.
It's easy, honestly.
Study from morning till midnight while your parents beat you, and anyone can get in.
Push it far enough to actually give yourself a mental illness, and anyone can pull it off.
Not totally sure I follow — what do you mean by "undiagnosed"?
You've never actually been to a psychosomatic clinic or a psychiatrist, right?
you'd be better off quickly learning JS, HTML, CSS, and C# and making money building your own apps.
No need to go outside.
You can work at your own pace.
Only a genius could pull it off.
If that degree of yours is real, you should be able to make a living as a programmer.
I haven't done much of that. I can write code, but what app am I even supposed to make?
I genuinely can't see society at all, so I have no idea what to build.
If someone tells me what to do, I can do it.
If nobody tells me, I can't do anything.
This has liberal-arts energy.
I'm guessing history major.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
This kind of “life-advice thread” is a familiar format on 5ch — anonymity tends to bring out a mix of blunt tough love and genuine sympathy. The thread split over whether recovery from depression is a matter of willpower or a process that has to include the physical body, with “stop making excuses” pushback running alongside concern about forcing oneself to push too hard. Some pointed out that academic achievement doesn’t necessarily correlate with social adaptability, meaning the “Kyoto University graduate” label alone doesn’t capture the full extent of the poster’s struggles. And as one commenter’s “undiagnosed” remark highlights, some of the mental health conditions the poster describes are self-reported rather than confirmed by an actual medical diagnosis — a nuance easy to miss from the quotes alone. The poster’s line about “never having had a single friend in my entire life” also offers a clue to how their isolation deepened over time.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Newsokku VIP) thread “What should I do with my life from here.”
