Always Take Half of Your Emotions

"Consume everything: food, drugs, books, movies, television, sex. Do not however, under any circumstances, experience these things fully. Consume as much as you can while exerting the least amount of effort possible. Eat food while standing in front of the refrigerator. Always choose pills over smokable or sortable drugs. Movies and television should only be watched in bed on your laptop using a Netflix account that your ex-boyfriend’s parents pay for. When you (rarely) have sex, it should be with whomever seems ‘most available’. It is important to show little or no emotional investment when finding a sex partner in order to completely eliminate all opportunities for rejection. If you have to do anything more than say, “Yes” and lie there while they have sex with you, do not have sex. It’s not worth it.
Have a nebulous, possibly nonexistent job that you can do from home. Tell people you are a freelance writer, or a DJ. When people ask how you spend your days, tell them you ‘mostly just work’. Make sure this is a job where nobody can track your progress. Invent an elaborate lie about how being in social situations makes you feel guilty, because you aren’t at home working, To some degree, this is true. You do feel guilty for not working. You wish you worked harder, but secretly you suspect that you lack the skill and discipline to succeed in your given field. You would rather constantly feel guilt for not working hard enough than deal with the unavoidable failure of working hard and not succeeding.
Live with your parents. Try not to leave your room under any circumstances. Leave your door open, but only a crack, so that your family won’t think you are depressed, but rather, they will assume that you are ‘working’ quietly and do not want to be disturbed unless it is absolutely necessary. Closing your door might put your family under the impression that something is wrong, which could potentially lead to a conversation about why you are closing them off, and that is exactly the kind of unimaginably nightmarish situation that you organize your entire life around avoiding.
Be agreeable in all interactions, whether with friends, family, romantic partners, drug dealers, or grocery store employees. Never say anything that might upset someone. Never be the kind of person that anyone could dislike for any logical reason. Always be polite, always be empathetic. Ask questions, make eye contact, be charismatic. This pattern of behavior is obviously incredibly exhausting and entirely unsustainable, therefore you may not remain in any social situation for more than an hour. Otherwise you will slip into a pattern of behavior that will lead people to believe you are the boring, unlikable person that you actually are.
Be self­-deprecating to the point where people can identify with you, but not to the point where people feel alienated or confused. Never, under any circumstances, should someone feel bad for you, or feel sympathy for your ‘situation’. What situation? There should be no ‘situation’, as far as anyone else is concerned. Everyone should think you are the regular amount of sad for any human in your general age range. Therefore, you should always downplay what you are really feeling. It is important to keep in mind that any ‘healthy’ person will feel approximately half of the negative emotions that you are experiencing. This means that you should always take half of your emotions and hide them from every living being on the planet. If that does not feel possible to you, then do not leave your room. I repeat, do not leave your room.

Desire insane amounts of validation from people. Never actively seek it. Never express any desires you have, then become upset when people don’t fulfill them. Become disillusioned with the world, with relationships and with humanity as a whole when you are treated poorly by someone you foolishly thought had enough patience to love you. Feel wronged when they don’t do the things you wanted them to do, even though you never told them what the things you wanted them to do were. Wonder why every person in the entire world seems inevitably separate from you at best, and in some kind of malicious plot against you at worst.
Never stop anyone from doing anything that bothers you. You have not earned the right to ask anything of anyone. You don’t deserve it. However, you should occasionally put yourself under the impression that maybe one day, using patience and empathy, or a small amount of telepathy, someone will figure out exactly what you want without you having to say anything. In turn, become frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
Listen to a friend talk about how when they are depressed, they swing unpredictably between being manically productive and manically unproductive. Realize that your depression only ever results in the latter. Wonder why your depression has to be different and shittier than other people’s depression. Begin to feel like something is horrifically, irreparably wrong with you, and that you are a profoundly inept person for not going through phases of extreme productivity during your depression. Convince yourself that you are ‘doing depression wrong’, just like everything else you do. Say things like ‘yeah, me too’ when your friend talks about being productive while depressed, then regurgitate what you heard in future conversations. Tell people that you sometimes become manically productive when you’re depressed, despite knowing for a fact that’s not true. Begin to wonder if other people are lying about that too, and if everyone is just depressed and unproductive and lying about it because they are also insecure in their depression. Almost allow yourself to feel less alone in the world and to feel like there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with you. Then, remember that, unlike you, other people have concrete proof of their productivity. Realize that you actually are completely and utterly alone in your laziness.
Begin to wonder if people who say they are productive when they’re depressed aren’t actually depressed. Immediately feel a deep sense of dread upon realizing that you aren’t an authority on who is or is not depressed. Feel like an irredeemable asshole because you, even if only momentarily, tried to take away other people’s god-­given right to self­-identify as ‘depressed’. You tried to invalidate other people’s depression, not just because you are insecure, but because your depression is, once again, shittier than everyone else’s depression. "