But if you are basing your actions on what you want or don't want, 'push' motivation ('do this or else') simply fails, and most 'pull' motivation ('do this and you get the shiny thing') fails because you know you won't care about the shiny thing, either
Indeed, that describes me very well.
Thank you for your kind words. It's late, and I need to get some sleep. Anyway, my current short-term problems are loneliness and having to take care of my 94-year-old grandmother. My loneliness can, in theory, be fixed by finding someone to spend time with in person, and then spending time with that person. Hopefully I'll figure out a way to do that; I guess that trying to contact people on my Facebook friends list might be a good start. Being stuck babysitting my grandmother nearly every day is another matter, though. I just don't see any way to improve that situation.
Hmm. What would happen to your grandmother if you were to find a job, and why can't that be arranged now? I understand that there will probably be some resistance from your parents to actually taking that course of action, in the circumstances, but realistically, how do they expect you to do anything with your life without the freedom to try new things?
In the meantime, you might want to try Second Life as a social venue - it's immersive enough to fill that need in a way that chat rooms and other text-only ways of communicating don't quite manage to, at least for me.
2:45:24 PM Katja Grace: The main thing that puts me off in online dating profiles is lack of ambition to save the world
2:45:35 PM Katja Grace: Or do anything much
2:48:03 PM Michael Blume: *nods*
2:48:07 PM Michael Blume: this is indeed a problem
2:57:55 PM Katja Grace: Maybe there is a dating site for smart ambitious nerds somewhere
2:58:25 PM Katja Grace: Need to set up lw extension perhaps
2:59:02 PM Michael Blume: haha, yes ^^
3:00:40 PM Katja Grace: Plenty of discussion on why few girls, how to get girls, nobody ever says 'oy, girls on lw, want to get together some time?'
3:01:14 PM Michael Blume: somebody really should say that
3:01:34 PM Michael Blume: hell, I'm tempted to just copy that IM into a top-level post and click 'submit'
3:01:48 PM Katja Grace: Haha dare you to