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Warning: This is a personal vent on my personal situation. I doubt it will be worth your time.
High school days were the peak of my life. School was easy, and I was fortunate enough to find interest and some talent in math olympiad. I climbed my way through before getting stopped just before the TST.
I remember them giving out big π-shaped chocolates for the IMO contestants that year, and getting really bitter because it looked so cool.
After I hit that wall I parted way with math to become a CS major because startups were a thing and I believed I could start the next Google by my own hands.
Fortunately I got accepted to a pretty good university.
So all in all, I didn't quite get there but still, I worked hard, and was able to take pride in my achievements.
Good times.
Anyways, after that I had multiple breakdowns, flunked the school, and spent 10 years mostly playing card games and masturbating.
It's not that I didn't try - rather I did multiple times. I was full with great ideas, some I still believe are viable, but overconfidence and lack of diligence got me and I underperformed quite bad.
Not one project was persisted until fruition and tens of half-assed unfinished ones were only a burden. For each ambitious projects, ultimately I hurt multiple people, and isolated myself more.
I can only attribute my failures to myself.
It's a really bad feedback loop. I start a project, get anxious fearing failure, fail because of lack of confidence and diligence, go back to cry in bed wondering where it all went wrong.
One time I needed to do a simple CSS work, couldn't make myself to do it, and just stared at the monitor for a whole day. Work was a simple static 3 pager for 2 weeks. I did not finish it. I got into a legal trouble for that. Fun times.
I can feel time and youth slipping away. I am clearly aware of how important this time is in my life. I also can feel the deteriorating working memory, and no longer feel like the smart guy good at math. I recently tried to solve some MO problems trying to recall fond memory of my AoPS days, and failed miserably.
I know. I should get a good sleep, exercise, reconnect with my friends, network with people, feel good about myself again, pick up new skills, finish that damn GTD book once and for all, diligently work on my projects, and it will be all good. Priviledge alarm is ringing left and right and I'm in my mom's basement furiously masturbating to a deepfake porn.
I do not know why I felt the need to post this here. I lurk this site a lot because it fits my worldview of putting logical thinking above most things. Maybe I wanted to reflect on my situation somewhat objectively by placing myself in public.
Not sure how I should wrap up this post. So I will not try.
I can relate to parts of this. School was simple, math olympiad was the peak of my life, then I switched to CS because I hoped I could make lots of money and retire early. (Spoiler: didn't happen.)
Then I failed to get a PhD, and realized I also suck at life outside of the school system. I was able to keep a job, but I switched jobs quite often. I don't finish most of the things I start, I waste a lot of time, and I neglect my health.
From outside I probably seem quite successful -- I make decent money, own an appartment in the city center, have a wife and two kids -- but if you know me closer, you can see a lot of stupid or self-destructive behavior. Life feels very difficult to me, and I don't know what to do to make it better. (Or like, I know on some level, but I am unable to follow my own advice. Turning off the internet would probably immediately greatly improve my quality of life.)
I have some evidence of being an undiagnosed asperger (or something very similar to it). Reading descriptions of people on the spectrum feels very familiar, except they usually feel things even stronger than me, so what is "possible, but with great suffering" for me, is "impossible" for them.
Seems to me that some problems are a vicious circle. Doing stupid things brings problems, problems make me mentally tired, being tired makes me do stupid things. Lack of interaction with friends makes me sad, being sad makes me less likely to reach out to my friends. Not finishing my projects makes me pessimistic about my abilities, being pessimistic about my abilities reduces the motivation to work hard on my projects. Predicting bad future makes me feel bad right now.
Building good habits is hard, and it is easy to lose them. I wish I could give some actionable advice here, but I can't. The best I have is... sometimes things get okay by a lucky coincidence, then the vicious cycle is broken, and things keep being okay for a while... until another coincidence disrupts them. I mostly know how to maintain the okay state, but I don't know how to regain it when I lose it.
It feels like there should be an easy solution... but maybe that's like telling a depressed person "why don't you simply smile and be happy?". Similarly, why don't I simply try to get enough sleep, exercise regularly, and meet my friends often? Dunno. I had time like this in the past, and it was great. But when something disrupts the routine, it is very difficult to build it again.
If you are similar to me, I would suggest ignoring the "GTD" and "picking up skills" for a moment, and focus on getting the fundamentals (friends, sleep, exercise -- probably in this order) right. That will give you the energy necessary for the rest of your life. On the other hand, focusing too much on other things may take your attention away from the fundamentals, and shortly afterwards everything will fall apart again. Also, friends need to be in real life, online doesn't work; you need to interrupt the internet, not to use friends as yet another excuse to get online.
Now maybe I should go and follow my own advice.
On building and keeping habits, I have a notebook with little bubbles for keeping track of daily habits:
There's a list of things to do every day (which I chose), and when I do them, I fill in the bubble for that task and day. Habits I have tracked include brushing my teeth 2x/day, meditating, excercisizing, working towards my goals, clearing Anki, and writing a short "mission statement" every day (I have also recently reserved a few pages for weekly habits, such as playing chess, shaving, or doing my laundry, which I have found so far to be valuable). Of course, you could choose whatever you think would help you live a better life. It should be fairly easy to recreate this system using blank paper, especially using graph paper.
I find that it has provided a good amount of value to me, and would recommend it to anybody who wants to build stronger habits.
If you can't effectively work on your own projects, it might be worth getting a job so that you have a structure.
This was ultimately the answer. This advice convinced me to apply for a job and I am now more productive than ever.
I was fortunate enough to find a job at a startup with lots of smart people, and I feel very alive again.
Just wanted to say thanks.
I don't have anything helpful to say, but I'm commenting because it's important to me that you know that you're not just shouting into the void. Life's tough. You matter, and I am confident that in the right conditions, you could do amazing and valuable things.
As far as actually getting into those right conditions... I'm reluctant to say anything, because I don't know your situation, and I'm sure you've heard plenty of the obvious refrains many, many, many times
Happy to just chat if you'd like. I've battled with similar problems of lack of focus, and done a lot of work myself. Happy to listen.
Thank you for writing this post. It can be hard to realize that one is in a persistent rut and harder to write it up publicly.
As someone similar to you (math competitions during high school, CS major, ambition often outruns my capacity, trying to avoid reverting to the mean during my adult years), I believe that I'm susceptible to failure modes like this. DM me if you want to video call to exchange advice or something; this would be valuable enough to me that I'm willing to pay a fair rate if you need funding.
Check that you are not missing any neurodiversity diagnoses such as aspergers or adhd. Your problems sound a lot like my problems. Internalized ablism could be really depowering. One wouldn't run a marathon with a hearth condition. It is true that these kinds of things can have alot of blurry lines and sceptics can have easy time to not believe it even exists but most of the time taking correctly a problem into account is way better than ignoring it completely.