what is the point of living?

I am 38, male, and this is just a report, not a poem, not a cry, not a lesson, just a dump like on /vent because that is what this site is for. I wake up, I go to work, I fail quietly, I come back, I eat trash, I sleep, repeat, that is the system. I never had a girlfriend, not once, not even the fake high school one people lie about to seem normal. Women never looked at me like a person, more like furniture or a problem to avoid, and yeah I know you will say “it’s your personality” or “work on yourself” because that is the standard script, quoted endlessly like a broken motivational poster. I am not saying I deserve love, I am saying the data shows I never had it, and after 38 years the trend line is pretty clear. No close friends either, no one texting me first, no one asking how I am unless it is HR pretending to care. At work I suck, not in a dramatic way, just enough to always be behind, always be the guy who “tries” but never advances, and you know what happens to guys like that. People say life is about “small joys” and “gratitude” but that sounds like marketing language invented to sell books to losers like me. Objectively speaking, if you remove romance, social validation, and competence, what is left that makes this worth repeating every day.

I am not writing this to shock you, I am writing it because I am tired of pretending this is some deep mystery. Men like me are told to shut up and improve or die quietly, and women are framed as prizes we failed to unlock, which makes everyone worse. I can be rude about it because honesty is rude now. When you go decades without touch, without being chosen, without even being hated passionately, it does something boring to your brain, not tragic, just empty. People quote Nietzsche or Camus about meaning, like “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”, but Sisyphus at least had a story and an audience. I have a cubicle and a login. Therapy is another quote machine, more phrases like “reframe your narrative” and “challenge your assumptions”, as if this is a creative writing class and not a statistical dead end. Women don’t owe me anything, fine, but reality doesn’t owe me hope either, so why is hope mandatory. This is the part where someone says “it gets better” with zero evidence, or links a study, or tells me to lift weights, as if muscle mass fixes being invisible. I am not angry all the time, I am tired, which is different and more permanent; do you really think repeating an unwinnable routine counts as living.

Here is the clean version, stripped of drama and insults, like a lab note. Subject is 38, male, isolated, underperforming, unloved, future probability of change low based on past behavior. External incentives minimal. Internal motivation degraded. That is it. I am not standing on a bridge, I am sitting at a desk typing because typing fills time. People confuse questioning life with wanting to die, but those are not identical, one is philosophical and one is logistical. I can ask “what is the point of living” the same way someone asks “what is the point of this job” without planning to quit today. Still, if you are reading this, answer honestly, not kindly, not with slogans. If you had my stats, my face, my history, my absence of proof that effort pays off, would you continue out of principle alone. Or is life just something we keep doing because stopping would make other people uncomfortable. I read quotes, I read threads, I read success stories, and they all assume a baseline I never had. Maybe the point is just to run the clock until it ends, maybe there is no point and we are supposed to admit that, maybe meaning is a luxury item. I don’t know, and I am not asking for rescue, I am asking for accuracy. If the answer is “there is no point but you do it anyway”, say that. If the answer is “there is a point and you missed it”, say that too. I am detached enough to hear it.

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