http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/04/ask-polly-why-should-i-keep-going.html

So here's my concrete advice for you: You're very depressed, so I want you to exercise every morning for one hour. Every other thing you do as an unemployed, depressed person is predicated on this step, and skipping it is tantamount to announcing to the world, I PREFER MISERY TO JOY. After you exercise, take a shower, make yourself some strong coffee, and look for a job for one hour. Research. Fix your résumé. Write cover letters. Email people for leads. Follow up. Get people on the phone. Do whatever you can, but you need a job soon. I also want you to work on something physical for one hour every day — clean your fridge, wash your floors and rewash them, paint the walls of your apartment a new color, refinish your coffee table, whatever. Don't tell me you don't do that kind of thing. Do it and trust. And yes, you must find a therapist. Commit. Borrow the money if you have to. You need this. You require it. You are not doing well, and it could get worse. Someone needs to be watching you closely, and you need to dig into your feelings. I suspect that this is one thing that you don't want to do, because you're terrified of your own feelings. And that's why you must do it. So you need to do a bunch of very hard things. But if you lean into your hard work right now, you're going to learn just what a crisis can do for you, how it can blow out the bad patterns of thinking and feeling, how it can change you from a person who clings and cowers and hides and pities herself to a person who faces the truth without fear and builds a gorgeous life out of the wreckage of the half-broken life that came before. You write, "I'm exhausted from trying so hard for so long (not just these past months, but all the years before them when I cycle through ambition and optimism and hard work only to end up lost and scared and alone), and I'm sick of trying." I know that feeling. But honestly, if you really think you've ended up back where you started, that tells me that what you really wanted from all of that hard work was a magical, external reward that never came. You expected to be released from the purgatory of work at some point, to cross some finish line and be magically rendered all-caps HAPPY. You wanted to become someone else. If you can't feel any of the gains you've made in the past, if you're sure that it's all a cycle in which zero is gained each time, if you don't recognize the slightest bit of progress, then I'd suggest to you that you're having trouble feeling your feelings, and you're treating love and success as external rewards that BRING happiness, when in fact love and success are SIDE EFFECTS of happiness. And happiness is all about loving the feeling of working hard. Happiness is all about loving whatever you have, wherever you are, even when you fall on your face, even when you have nothing, even when your muscles are aching and you feel caved in and sad. People who say that they're lost and scared — like you do — are often anxious and hiding. People who say they're exhausted all the time are often exhausted because they’re busy distracting themselves from their own feelings around the clock. And when a big wave of emotion comes and knocks them down, they experience it as a tsunami that just wiped away all meaning and all gains.