I went through something very similar at the same age. It’s a quarter life crisis.

The kinds of people who make it through engineering school are typically highly motivated to succeed. From a very young age, whether this motivation is external or internal, they have a plan to execute. This plan requires MASSIVE personal sacrifices. Being a responsible teen and young adult to succeed at the level necessary to achieve success in engineering SUCKS. You watch your friends have fun and make memories without you. You miss out on nights out at the bar, concerts, beach vacations, crawfish boils, etc. You tell yourself that all of that sacrifice is worth something.

However, engineering jobs SUCK. You work 70+ hours as a cubicle drone, possibly in a trailer, typing spreadsheets alone for $70k/year. Your company has zero loyalty to you, and probably forces you to uproot and move every 2 years in order to be eligible for promotion, assuming they don’t just lay you off and replace you with an H1B or offshore your facility to India or China.

After a few years, one starts to look back on their misspent youth and wonder…was it all worth it?

This is just how the “successful” guy starts thinking in his late 20’s. What about those who get in the workforce and flame out? School and work are two completely different animals. They have very different environments, require different skillsets, and have entirely separate paths to success. One’s ability to succeed on the job is often paradoxical to their success in school.

This guy’s “break” could have been triggered by any number of reasons beyond simple disillusionment with how crappy corporate jobs are. (And yes, some of this is definitely projection as I am guided by my own experiences and biases).

Depression sets in when someone recognizes a situation is untenable, but also can’t think their way out of it. It’s the body’s reaction to realizing it’s f$&king trapped, they are no longer dictating circumstances but are having circumstances dictated to them. Depression is feeling a distinct loss of control over one’s life leading to the break down of one’s ability to interface with basic day to day activities. Once one realizes they have no control to change a bad situation, they stop trying to change it, then they stop trying period.

He could have realized that he’s poorly suited to his job yet his qualifications don’t really allow him to do anything else for work to make a living.

He could have been someone who was externally motivated and lost that external source. For me, I was scared of my dad as a kid. He pushed me to be disciplined and demanded perfection (anything less was brutally punished). Once he wasn’t in my life looking over my shoulder applying punishment for every slight infraction, I stopped trying so hard. I wasn’t passionate about success, I feared the consequences of imperfection. Once the consequences were gone, my discipline slipped and grades suffered. If he feared consequences of tiny failures, and those consequences were taken away, it could have resulted in growing problems until he eventually lost the discipline needed to maintain his stressful job.

Love can also be a great external motivation. A guy with a great relationship who wants to raise a family will work hard to make that possible. He will eat a lot of crap to keep his wife happy and children fed and healthy. Will he take the same kind of crap when it’s only his well-being he has to worry about? It is possible a breakup caused him to question his motivations for why he continued to work the jobs he had so hard and stop caring.

In my opinion, if you strip a man of love, friendship, purpose, and means, you will get a broken man every time.

Whatever he is feeling, those feelings come from a genuine place. He needs to explore those feelings, confront them, and process them in a healthy way. He needs to figure out his priorities in life, find a goal worth striving for, and build a support system to get there. Christianity is a good option, but it’s not a silver bullet for everyone. Christianity can give a sense of community, purpose, the ability to live for others, a process for removing guilt and shame (forgiveness of sins), etc. It can go a long way towards helping a broken person find a path, but it is not the only path towards a well-balanced life (it’s the only path to something else, but I am trying to avoid this becoming a religious thread).

Until he finds a goal and a path that gives him motivation (whether from within or without), he will continue to be depressed. He will drift from job to job because they don’t matter. Nothing matters when one feels trapped without hope for anything better.