Like seriously, he's spent the 15 years I've known him coasting, bitching about his life, and not really doing anything to improve, jumping from one bad relationship to the next because of his fear of being lonely, not going for what he wants in life because of his fear of rejection, and basically just... not trying.
His older brother is married, successful, with two kids, and my buddy is bitching about it and how he wants to change his life (which he always does) and I just finally got tired of being a sounding board, and let him have it. He's always bitching about wanting to change this and that and just never does anything, just makes noise about it and wants a pity party and I basically just let him have it that at age 29, all his problems are self-created and self-inflicted and that he feels like a leech because he's being a leech and that all his friends have spent more than a decade trying to get him to change and see why his life is shit and he's spent all that time denying and not doing anything about it, and that's the reason no one but me hangs out with him anymore.
I kind of ranted for like forty minutes bringing stuff up over teh past ten years as examples as to why he's basically been failing life and how it was up to him to make the best of his situation and he consistently doesn't make an effort because he's more scared of failing than anything else, and that ironically enough is what turned him into a failure.
The quarter-life crisis is real.
Anyway, he broke down and started crying and I felt really awkward because I didn't expect that. He said he was gonna try to do better and then he left because his horribly abusive and shitty girlfriend called him to monopolize his time some more.
You weren't expecting him to cry from that? You spent 40 minutes ranting about his life and how terrible he is, and how he was ruining yours and others lives. It's one thing to feel like you're the problem in your own life, but to throw it in his face that he's a burden and hurting everyone around him would only compound the problems. A lot of people who suffer from anxiety and depression are very aware of what options they have to actually improve their life, but because they have that anxiety/depression it prevents them from actually going through with the steps. With anxiety, it can be paralyzing to take that step and it's easy to get stuck in your own head about the possibilities. Depression can do similar things where they feel like nothing they do can actually fix the issue, so they don't actually take the steps either. Whether its seeing a therapist, exercising, or just taking care of themselves more, depression makes it much harder to actually see the benefits in those. It's easier for him to say that therapists are too expensive than it is for him to explain that he doesn't feel like they can actually help him.
I can't speak for your friend personally, but when people reach out and have trouble making progress, it's not necessarily because they want a pity party, but they're desperate to find some kind of solution they haven't thought of or some way to actually take those steps forward because they're miserable. I get that you reached your breaking point after 10 years, and its not on you to fix anyone, but I don't think the way you went about this was really the best way to get him help. I'm not really a fan of the whole tough love kind of thing in general, it wasn't helpful in the slightest when I was struggling and just made me feel worse.