No ridicule here, only empathy. It’s a rough hand you’ve been dealt. I wish I had some magic advice to give you but I don’t have any relevant knowledge of Cambodia or how to better secure a life for yourself. What I can say is that being in your 20’s you still have plenty of time to figure your life out.

You’re educated and in tech so it’s possible some remote work could come your way, or that you could try your hand at creating something of your own to try and market. Contributing to GitHub projects might help you make some connections and networking for jobs. If all else fails, there’s no shame in doing some retail, sales, or labour work while you wait for the tech market to improve (I’m in IT myself, it’s rough out there right now with all these layoffs.).

Either way, please don’t make any rash choices you can’t take back. It may seem pretty hopeless right now but time has a way of changing that perspective. The world is better with you in it.

Much love from your Canadian brother :)

My life is almost a total failure. I am in my 20s

Your life has barely started. It can’t be a failure when it’s barely begun. You spend 18 years with no real control over yourself or your trajectory, then you finally begin to make a few relevant decisions for yourself. Even if you’re 29, you really only start your life when you’re 19-20. That’s 10 years out of 50+, assuming you live to be at least 70. You have only lived a small fraction of your life.

I won’t pretend to know the unique challenges you’re facing, the difficulities of finding work in your region/with your degree, or the social/economic struggles you’re facing because I am so far divorced from your life that any direct discussion is so meaningless. I would never have the relevant information and context, so I can’t suggest what you should do in a tangible way. What I can say, is this: find what you want to measure your life in, and work towards that. If you value your life through work and wealth, I can understand why you’d feel the way you do, but there far more ways to be prosperous, and things you can focus on.

A healthy dose of positive nihilism would do you wonders: each and every one of us is so tiny, so insignificant, that the difference between a “successful” and “unsuccessful” life in the terms you’ve defined literally do not matter. You and Elon Musk will both die and decompose, and regardless of either of your impact on the world, this rock we’re riding around the sun will continue to support life for a time, and one day everything humanity has ever conceived will be dust, and our sun will explode, and the universe won’t care if you lived with your parents or owned a mansion. The only things that matter are the things we, individually, give meaning to. If you choose to find meaning and value in creating art then your work has meaning and value. If you choose to find meaning and value in helping others find joy and happiness, then dedicate yourself to your friends, your family and your community, because that has meaning and value. If you want to experience the world through literature and media, then engaging with that material has meaning and value. No one else can define what matters to you in this world, because they’re not you.

I’m sorry that what you’ve spent time and energy on isn’t panning out for you. I really, truly am. But step back, and think about if those things matter to you because they matter to you, or because everyone else has told you it’s what a successful, prosperous life looks like. Then consider what your version of a good and meaningful is, and chase that. Many people waste 10, 15, 20+ years on things that they ultimately realize don’t bring them joy. In a way, you’re lucky to have found out sometime in your 20s that what you’ve been working on isn’t leading you where you want to be. It took me until 33.

Its not you/your country. The cost of living has vastly outpaced wages almost everywhere.

I feel bad for this generation and the struggles faced.

There are apps like Fiver where you can connect with people (around the world) needing your skills for short stints. Maybe try that until you find something permanent.

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.

you have access to the internet, an eng degree and you at least write English fairly well. Are you looking for only local jobs? how about remote opportunities? Many companies will hire remote work with no experience, there’s also job brokers, where you are hired for a project and then moved to another. These are by no means the best kind of job, but they can get you back on your feet.

Dude, you got plenty of time. Look for remote jobs. Somebody needs you and your computer engineering skills! Speaking English also unlocks a lot of potential opportunities for remote work.