Feel free to not take this advice, but I feel it wouldn’t be negligent if I didn’t at least share this. For me, the way I got over any despair over personal circumstances or difficulties, a very long time ago, was to focus entirely on the social root causes, not any individualised approach. The issues you talk about with employment, cost of living, even the nuclear family, are rooted in capitalism and class society. I don’t distress about my struggles with these things; I focus my time on communist organising and am at peace knowing I am doing all that I can do to change things. If things don’t get better for me personally, I have the hope that they will be better for the next generation, or generations down the line, and I know I have lived a life of dignity and self-respect by resisting. I read the book Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, when I was a teenager, and found the concept of, and Huey’s explanation of, revolutionary suicide to be very good at articulating all this.

Of course, this is quite particularised advice if you aren’t already inclined towards far-left politics. But this is why I have never seriously entertained the thought of suicide since I was 12, and it is what I would’ve needed to hear/know at that age, so I figured I’d share. The whole “it gets better” bullcrap never worked on me cause my life was objectively awful due to societal factors, so if I had only followed conventional advice for these kinds of issues I would definitely be dead by now. So maybe this more unconventional advice will help someone. If you want it in more conventional terms, you could think of it as “live for a cause, not for yourself”, but I think it’s important to recognise how it is also to improve your own conditions and the conditions of people like you.