1. Why shouldn't Alice self-modify into someone who has a stronger passion for homelessness, for 4 mu?

You can't make decisions based on what your future self would value, any more than you can make decisions based on what your past self valued. Even with TDT.

1. "Be yourself" means "do not suppress your identity". It involves avoiding the trap of thinking e.g. that because your knowledge of Asian adult film stars is low-status, you should conceal it even at the cost of added stress. If you are playing status games, you don't want to be yourself- you want to be high status. If you are not playing status games, your status is irrelevant and you should act accordingly.

2. Depression (a chemical state of the brain) is not laziness, nor lack of motivation, nor akrasia, nor lack of motivation. If you are referring to something other than a chemical state, try using 'melancholy'.

Personally, I have found that tying performance to ability to self-image is helpful at improving both, provided I also make careful use of cognitive dissonance: I deny that poor performance is the result of poor ability, breaking the negative feedback, while associating good performance with high ability and good identity. It's often uncomfortable identifying how my forced perception of high ability is compatible with focusing effort on improving my ability to meet standards, but I prefer it to the possibility of having high ability and high performance but low self-image (imposter state).

Basically, I explicitly prefer high self-image to low self-image regardless of ability or performance, and doublethink well enough that the mutual boosts dominate the exchange.