Well... I've had some pretty bad experiences with employment. The last time I was employed, I sat in a cubicle and surfed the Internet all day while feeling guilty about not getting anything done. It was really awful. I once signed up with a temp agency. My first assignment lasted a week. After it was done, the customer complained about me (please don't ask why) and I was fired from the temp agency. Another time, I worked as a cashier at a supermarket, and I lasted all of three days before being fired for insubordination.

Money's never been a very big motivator for me. I've got over twenty thousand dollars sitting in the bank, so if I want to spend $50 on a video game, or $300 on a video game system, I can. And I have enough unplayed video games sitting on my shelf to last me a long, long time. What would I do with more money? Well, I did decide within the last 24 hours that I definitely can't cope with being my mom's caretaker any more, so I'd want to move out of my parents' house, and I'd want to get a cat, and I once calculated that it would cost me a few thousand dollars a year to play Magic: the Gathering competitively, but that's about it.

The usual "carrot-and-stick" approach to motivation doesn't work too well on me; I just give up on getting the carrots and resign myself to enduring the sticks. Is that what they call "learned helplessness"? I've had people trying to drum the lesson "you're going to have to do what you're told, regardless of what you want to do, and fighting will only make things worse" into me my whole life, and it seems like they were mostly right: as a child, you're pretty powerless to get what you want, if what you want is "not to go to school".