Usually feeling unmotivated despite having goals which you consider intellectually important is a sign that your hominid brain is not getting important things that it wants, and/or doesn’t think that it will get the important things that it wants if it pursues the target of your intellectual interest.
Some people’s brains are different and they are capable of being motivated by pure intellectual pursuits. Most of us do not operate this way. We need to achieve ego-narratively-satisfying levels of safety, comfort, and belonging.
Almost everyone at your age struggles with meaning and a lack of a sense of belonging. In some sense this is a feature, not a bug, because it motivates the human animal to prioritize the acquisition of safety/comfort/belonging. Think about it this way—if you weren’t miserable right now, you would never be motivated to do the uncomfortable things necessary to secure a stable life, much less a mate.
On the flip side, when you and/or your ego feel safe, secure, and socially relevant, motivation for abstract intellectual tasks will blossom on its own.
It can be awkward to admit the degree to which your human-animal self is uninterested in or actively sabotaging your intellectual pursuits. You still have to make the human-animal self happy if you want to free up the cognitive energy to do important things. This may be frustrating it, but I suggest re-framing it as part of the challenge and fun of life.
tl;dr: Take care of yourself, treat yourself as somebody for whom you are responsible, and under these conditions, motivation and ambition grow on their own.
After reading lukeprog article “Build small skills in the right order” I came to understand that another reason why I am overworked is that I tackle big things without an effective plan for example a large chunk of the code I am building is built upon a peer to peer network even though I have wrote webserver code before and understand the inner workings of protocols I never built a toy p2p application. What happens then is not only my reward is delayed again because I face technical difficulties but this makes me procrastinate because the problem is just too large.
I don’t know if this is how it works but the last night and today were spent reading blogposts here and somehow all the explanations and advice I wanted fell into piece it’s like the puzzle of the why I am lost is in front of my eyes and I wasn’t even looking at it.
I think this falls right under things that I need to fix.
Thanks again for your reply it was very enlightening.
Usually feeling unmotivated despite having goals which you consider intellectually important is a sign that your hominid brain is not getting important things that it wants, and/or doesn’t think that it will get the important things that it wants if it pursues the target of your intellectual interest.
Some people’s brains are different and they are capable of being motivated by pure intellectual pursuits. Most of us do not operate this way. We need to achieve ego-narratively-satisfying levels of safety, comfort, and belonging.
Almost everyone at your age struggles with meaning and a lack of a sense of belonging. In some sense this is a feature, not a bug, because it motivates the human animal to prioritize the acquisition of safety/comfort/belonging. Think about it this way—if you weren’t miserable right now, you would never be motivated to do the uncomfortable things necessary to secure a stable life, much less a mate.
On the flip side, when you and/or your ego feel safe, secure, and socially relevant, motivation for abstract intellectual tasks will blossom on its own.
It can be awkward to admit the degree to which your human-animal self is uninterested in or actively sabotaging your intellectual pursuits. You still have to make the human-animal self happy if you want to free up the cognitive energy to do important things. This may be frustrating it, but I suggest re-framing it as part of the challenge and fun of life.
tl;dr: Take care of yourself, treat yourself as somebody for whom you are responsible, and under these conditions, motivation and ambition grow on their own.
After reading lukeprog article “Build small skills in the right order” I came to understand that another reason why I am overworked is that I tackle big things without an effective plan for example a large chunk of the code I am building is built upon a peer to peer network even though I have wrote webserver code before and understand the inner workings of protocols I never built a toy p2p application. What happens then is not only my reward is delayed again because I face technical difficulties but this makes me procrastinate because the problem is just too large. I don’t know if this is how it works but the last night and today were spent reading blogposts here and somehow all the explanations and advice I wanted fell into piece it’s like the puzzle of the why I am lost is in front of my eyes and I wasn’t even looking at it. I think this falls right under things that I need to fix. Thanks again for your reply it was very enlightening.