I was going over the Sequences on metaethics, and it was leaving a bad taste in my mouth. The examples are all about killing or saving children (both of which are far outside my personal experience). The assumption is that the participants in a discussion about metaethics are, in fact, moral in the normal sense of the word. That they're talking about justifications behind beliefs they actually act on, like not killing babies. That, when the philosophical discussion is over, they will go back to being basically good people, and so part of the purpose of the philosophical discussion is to explain to them why they shouldn't stress out too much. If there were no "morality," you still wouldn't kill babies, Eliezer presumes. Philosophy is just so much verbal dressing on something basically secure.
But my situation is a little different. From time to time, like Pierre, I don't care. I get emotionally nihilistic. I find myself doing things that are morally awful in the conventional meaning of the word: procrastinating, sneaking other people's food out of the communal fridge, being casually unkind and unhelpful, breaking promises. I don't doubt that these are awful things to do. I figure any moral theory worth its salt will condemn them -- except the moral theory "I don't care," which sometimes seems strangely compelling. In an "I don't care" mood, I generally don't care about the truth or falsehood of factual claims either. What does it matter? Penguins are green and they are a deadly menace to human society.
What I want to know is: what goes through people's heads when they're motivated not to be awful? What could you tell someone as a reason not to be awful? If you are, in fact, not awful, why aren't you awful?
Edit: the kind of why I mean is not a justification (Humans have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) or an explanation (Humans care about the things evolution leads them to care about.) I'm talking about an internal heuristic or a gesture at an intuition. What do you think, or feel, when you care about things? What would you tell someone who claims "I just don't care" if you wanted to get her to care? What would you tell yourself, in your nihilistic moments?
Bad advice -- on 2 levels.
First, people drastically overestimate the expected awesomeness of their plans and underestimate the expected awfulness.
(From now on, I will write just "awful" where I mean "expectedly awful".)
The way to counteract this natural human bias is to cultivate a visceral aversion to any awful effects of one's decisions and actions, and never to trade awful effects for even much larger awesome effects. (Some people are too scrupulous about avoiding awful effects, but most should be more scrupulous.) Sure, according to consequentialism, the ends do justify the means, but consequentialism should be used IMHO mainly to evaluate conflicting non-consequentialist systems of ethics. The human mind is too prone to self-serving biases and motivated cognition for anyone to run consequentialism straight.
The other reason this is bad advice for heterosexual men is that many straight women will tolerate extreme awfulness in a sexual partner if the partner has wealth or status. Crime bosses, for example, even convicted ones, have more -- and probably better -- sexual and relationship options than most men reading these words do.
So for a straight man I would modify parent's advice about how to try to get himself out of nihilistic procrastination as follows: he should ask himself if he would expect a man he admires and would like to work with to find it attractive.
I didn't mean it as planning advice, I meant it as evaluating your current action/state. That is you do not have to maximise it, you simply use it as a hack to stop doing things you would regret later, by expecting it to give you a little spurt of feeling awesome for having stopped doing the bad action.
Awesomeness is a person specific state as well as Echoing Horror noted. There is no point being attractive to the members of your preferred sex that are antithetical to your ideals.
Some women like men that can achieve things (even if it isn't typical money+power), so any thing that helps you achieve your goals can be awesome. Be it Maths or learning ruby on rails.