My business failed and now I'm unemployed and there's no decent job. I'm gonna become homeless. I see no good reason to keep living. I feel like the song "A Bad Dream" by Keane.

Really missing those, cold dark and quiet winter nights of long past.

When i was kid, proper winter rocked now as adult i have very little chance to enjoy of it and where i live now we get more water than snow. Which absolutely ... sucks, because wet kids also get sick. :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXvXFO0O3AA

My brother is going through a similar thing, after his biz partner really screwed things up.

You can't let this define your worth as a person. You tried, it didn't work out, and you learned some lessons, so you now brush yourself off and try something else. But don't give up on things because of this setback.

At least your brother has a legitimate reason why things are bad. This is my second time failing at business (although this time it was my own 100% with no other names attached). I feel so stupid with all my financial losses. I am lost. All I can do is dream about winning the lottery or doing something to escape this reality.

Well, he has his share of the blame - didn't pay enough attention to what was going on until the shit had already hit the fan. By then, too late. The wife and I sucked up a pretty healthy hit, too, since we had loaned the business money. So be it. I still love my brother and this doesn't change anything between us.

But you gotta take your lumps and keep trying. Maybe running your own business isn't your thing but that doesn't mean that you can't find success and happiness in your work. I'm sure it looks pretty grim right now but you simply have to keep trying.

I suck at pep talks, I know. Just don't give up on life, and don't give up on yourself. Plenty of people are too timid or frightened to try what you did - twice, so it seems that you're not afraid to take risk. Now combine that with the lessons you've learned and move forward from here.

"...doing something to escape this reality."

Explain...

I might be reading too much into this but just in case: Think about how the people you know would react and feel if you "escaped this reality." Just think of them in mourning with a big dose of guilt.

I don't mean to push my problems on here or anything. Normally I just keep to myself as much as possible. I just suffer from long-term depression and my way of escaping from reality is playing games or sleeping. It used to be writing and drawing but I lost interest.

Well, yes and no in that you're reading into it too much. I have attempted self-destructive behaviour in the past. I actually have nothing to lose in that regard because I don't know anyone. I'm a loner.

You're also experiencing a chance for amazing opportunity. Try and couch all of this in philosophy. The answers will come...

When we've lost everything, we're free to do anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfDVLsBXYcM

So you were willing to strike out on your own.
And you were willing to try again after failing once.
And now you have the experience of running two businesses.

That's a pile of positives.

My wife was friends with the fella who ran the entrepreneurs club at her school. His own start-ups were flop after flop. But many, many successful entrepreneurs would consult with him because he had learned so flippin' much. Anyway, such a group would definitely recognize your value, and may even invite you to give a talk about your experience (sometimes known as a post-mortem). I think that generally, entrepreneurs see failure as experience.

And hell, your willingness to try already puts you above most folks, I reckon. (Including me!)

edit:
Also, you'd be totally welcome in the Draw and Guess the Game thread.

Heh, Fight Club is one of my favourite movies and that is one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite movie characters. There's a lot of truth in that.

Not everyone needs to run their own business, you know (although I see the appeal). You can have a happy life working in someone else's business. Or you could take some business classes if you feel you just need to sharpen your business sense a little, and try again later at some point?

Best of luck to you either way, but yeah, don't let these setbacks get you down. Nobody is perfect at everything; everybody screws up -- and in a rather big way too -- sometimes!

A client is pissing me off to the max. Have been working for this company for almost two years, there haven't been any problems but now they changed my contact there. Not only does the new guy's incompetence know no limits - he's additionally being a total dick on a rather personal level.

First world problem:

So I apparently missed the memo where Youtube ads became unskippable, or...? Ok, their service, and it is free to use (for now at least), so up to them. But this just seems similar step-by-step conditioning as with DRM, slowly but surely trying to introduce us to the delights of games as a service (always online) and maybe even streaming gaming.

"Hey, you have ads, but at least you can skip them, so no problem."

"Ok, they can't be skipped anymore, but does it really matter if you need to wait a bit, as there always were those ads anyway?"

"Now there are ads also embedded in the middle the videos, does it really matter?"

Maybe micro-transactions next, in order to see the punchlines in funny cat videos, or to enable audio. What, did you expect it all be free, huh? It takes money to keep up the servers, you know!

I'm not sure if it's AdBlock Plus or Disconnect but with them I never see ads on YouTube which is funny because I always get surprised whenever I use a different computer that has no ad blocking methods installed.

If only Smart TVs supported AdBlocks.. :)