No motivation...

[RWB]

For a long time now I've just been a bum, my job is a pretty good one even though it's tech support I like the guys I work with, but it's not paying very well in comparison to the butt loads of money I spent for the 17+ months I went to Orlando and attended Full Sail for art.

So basically I am in a rut, I know how to use all this software for 3D and 2D artwork, I work on web stuff here and there but I just can't stay focused on it for too long. After a week or two I just don't care anymore, hell this goes for video games as well! I've been here at work... probably taken 3 calls in the past 6 hours by myself, alone, I could be playing WoW but I ain't... it's like I prefer to be bored or something and it drives me nuts.

I want to get into a job with web development or maybe something with 3D, but I have nothing to show for myself even though I consider myself pretty good at all this stuff. I enjoy doing it as well, but I have no motivation. Sometimes I open 3D Max and I just sit there fiddling with a box doing nothing with it... trying to do something though. I'll even sometimes just get up and clean the apartment or something in hopes that maybe I'll think of something I want to do.

I'll try to force myself to do something random... a bridge, a character, a lake, or even build some random site or design in photoshop.... I start to do it but then it just fades.

I mean this is a real problem for me, and I don't know what to do.

[TheSmJ]

Sounds like depression to me. Wouldn't hurt to see a shrink.

[primesuspect]

This is the summary of my life, Chris. I know exactly what you're talking about.

[jared]

Well, if that is depression then I would say I know, including myself, a lot of depressed people :D

Seriously, I think a lot of people have that sort of problem staying focused or committed to something. I use to be really bad about this, you just have to make it a point to get better at being productive. I calculated it out, I use to spend god-awful amounts of time (hours upon hours) just surfing forums, reading digg, and doing spontaneous things on the internet and being bored.

For me to solution was to just sit back and analyze my habits and my life. I want to be successful and that requires focus and productivity. Being a lazy bastard was getting me nowhere quick as my life was just flying by, and that is not what I wanted. When I feel that I am bored, being unproductive, or wasting my time playing hours of games, I write myself out a list of everything I need to (and should be) working on. Then I get started working on that list. I didn't always finish everything on the list, but for me it helps to be able to see ALL the things I could/should be working on instead of wasting my time away.

I know what you mean about getting burned out quickly on projects, this is common for people our age I would say. My advice is get started on 2-3 projects you are _interested_ in. Start working on a web design layout, start messing around with some php development, start a project in 3D max. Then when you burn out on one, just start working on one of the other ones. This way you will always have something to jump to, leaving you less time to just sit around bored and wasting your time.
Lastly, getting organized helped me. I read the book "Getting Things Done" and it helped.

There is no instant solution to what you are going through, I still feel like that at times. All I can say is you really have work at it and slowly you will get through it.

cheers

[primesuspect]

Maybe it's something with our generation. Everybody I know is at least somewhat like this.

Is this what TV did to us? :eek3:

[profdlp]

...Is this what TV did to us? :eek3:
Maybe.

Think about it, you just sit there doing nothing while the people on the show live out their lives for you (so you don't have to be troubled to live your own), and all problems are resolved within 30-60 minutes.

Then go out into the real world where problems sometimes go on for years or more - many never get solved at all - and see if you don't feel depressed about it.

Find something to do that involves actually doing something, not just passively sitting on your ass watching the rest of the world go by.

***************************************

On Topic: RWB - the above is not directed at you personally (though if the shoe fits... ;) ). It's a general comment in response to the question prime raised.

To address your question more specifically, did the feelings you describe here seem to worsen over the past month or two?

[Nomad]

First of all, I'd say maybe see a doctor about either depression or ADD. However I will say with the 3D work I did, I often found myself unmotivated because I wasn't very fond of my job. Even when I was fond of my work--which happened more often than not--I worked sporradically because sometimes I quite simply didn't feel in the mood. I've found it difficult to force a type of work that requires at least some amount of creativity. Now, luckily I worked freelance and was given this freedom, but in a more rigid workplace I doubt you'll find that flexibility.

May I ask, do you really set goals before you start, or are you just fiddling around? A lot of times people don't complete things because they have no goal in mind, so they meander around.

I'd agree also with what Jared said about having a project to jump to. My father for the last decade always had at least two projects going on in the house, or one project turns into a larger one that encompasses multiple things. While this leaves the house in a perpetual state of progress and may seem weird, things really do get done. Otherwise he just gets bored and stops the project. Thus why our porch cedar siding remained sanded but unpainted for about fifteen years.

[primesuspect]

social experiment: raise two kids in the 21st century with no TV.

Year 8, day 348: Today went good. They did not ask to watch TV.

[mmonnin]

Get a job thats busier. 3 calls in 6 hours isnt work.

[godzilla525]

Well I was thinking off and on about starting a thread on this sort of thing for a couple of years, but figured I was just in a slump and would get over it (and look back at my post and think it was silly). Well guess what...

WARNING! LONG WHINY POST AHEAD!

This is one of a few reasons I'm on year 7 of a BS/EET. I end up sitting here staring off into space because stuff that was once fun to do is now a major chore. One thing that I actually liked to do, and they sucked all the enjoyment out of it. Most of the time I look forward to death. :clap:

And it's no fun with a 4 year old lappy that's only good for 6+ year old games. :bigggrin:

Part of the problem is there's really nothing that interesting going on around here. Yeah, there's a bunch of Engineers, but none of them are girls and they all just want to do the bare minimum and then go off someplace and get tanked. Nobody's here because they actually LIKE engineering.

There is a 'Gamers Club' here that was doing something funny outside yesterday with a giant cardboard Nintendo mock-up, but they're a clique-y and somewhat exclusive bunch. Besides, the club VP got arrested last week for having 80 vids and 600 pics of child pr0n. (LOL!, Loser was standing outside for two hours dressed as Santa Claus, whom he resembles, on Halloween, passing out candy to kids. I HOPE HE GETS AIDS AND DIES IN JAIL!) So I went from probably not having anything to do with them to DEFINITELY not having anything to do with them.

Meh. I graduate/fail out in December anyway, so the worst experience of my life thus far will finally be over. I'm happy for that. I would encourage anyone looking at going to college to explore other options: Stay away from the Penn State system, especially Penn State Behrend in Erie. You will be bored, worked, and nickel-and-dimed to near death. I don't know if any other college is any better, but I'm surprised at what passes for the norm in academia. Cheats, drunks, trolls, unwashed hippies, morons, and antisocials. I don't know how some of these people EVER got this far. There are people I knew that never graduated high school that are WAY smarter than most of these dolts.

The other part is that there are no real job opportunities around here that catch my interest, it's just the same dozen or two companies that suck so bad that nobody wants to work for them. :)

What I enjoyed the most the past few years was working over the summer. Job A was in a small injection molding plant. I liked it. I liked the 20 min drive through rural 2-lanes. I could get busy and zone out for 8 or 12 hours depending on the shift, assembling parts, filling boxes, moving pallets. People would sometimes quit before the end of their first day, but for me a bad day at Job A was better than a good day at school.

Job B was phone customer service/office-y stuff for a newspaper. That was fun... even standing at the copier for hours scanning in records: I could zone out and a couple hours later be done with that letter of the alphabet. Even busy phone days dealing with cranky customers was better than a good day at school. We would chat and swap stories when the phones got quiet (here at school, I can go the better part of a week without anyone saying more than one word to me). That was a 50 minute drive either way; the commute home on the interstate was often like a Daytona or Talladega race—80+ MPH bumper to bumper. Pretty much every other weekend was mowing the lawn or spending quality time under the car.

I can't really put my finger on it, but apparently I'm not comfortable with the prospect of work that I can't zone out while doing.

I want my tuition and the last 7 years of my life back.:-/

and I salute you, RWB, because I can't do tech support over the phone with members of my own immediate family without wanting to get violent.

[RWB]

Well I went to a doc the other day and I forgot I wanted to see about my ADD or ADHD, I did have that growing up and perhaps it's a growing problem again. A friend of mine takes Aderhal or whatever it's called, says I probably would benefit from it as well. My cousins also have mentioned the same saying that he used to be kinda the way I am, but funnier :P

I might check that out again... back when I was taking medicine for ADD I quit because I didn't feel it made a difference. It was Ritalin I was taking too.

As for the help desk thing... I've gotten pretty numb to most things except excuses like "It works everywhere else," or "It's brand new so it can't be my computer" which doesn't mean squat when it only takes seconds to get a virus or change a setting that breaks the internet connection lol! Of course it's great revenge when you show them that it was their computer. But other then that I have a lot of patience with people, probably too much. Most of the time hehe.

Ohh and I doubt I have depression, I feel I have gotten past that.... it's more like a "I can't bring myself to give a damn" syndrome. Even though I kinda do, otherwise I wouldn't have made this thread. The only depression I get is when I realize my own short meaningless life, and that it'll eventually be over... but that usually occurs when I try to get some sleep...

[godzilla525]

it's more like a "I can't bring myself to give a damn" syndrome.

Yup. I have that too. I used to be the one to go after bonus points. I was doing fine at school until I got into the math classes. Calc 2 was when things got hard, and things really shot downhill across the board academically when I went from a local campus to one I actually have to live at. It didn't help that there wasn't any official tutoring help here for anything beyond Calc 1. I had to work my butt off for those Ds and Fs. I went from wanting to be a math expert (there was an ancient post around here somewhere on that) to never wanting to see it again. Some of the professors here are real jerks that you can't get around; they're the only one teaching a particular class. Having to take a class two or three times to pass is a common occurrence, and people are *still* confused. So there's no incentive for them to teach, and I'm also convinced that they have some sort of racket going on.

The overall college experience is probably why jobs other people hate are like a vacation to me. It really is (or was) that bad.

There is some sort of personal counseling here, but I'd prefer NOT to have my crap gossiped around to my profs.

I switched majors, but only after I got to the point where I learned that no matter how hard I tried, that I'd never make it to where I wanted to be. So I stopped trying, and have been here ever since. And when I start to think about how old I am and how much money was flushed down the toilet on the way....:shakehead

My blood sugar being all over the place doesn't help any either. I usually end up having to either eat or get some sleep if I start feeling like I want to jump out my 3rd floor window. My mom thinks it's diet-related (she's on a health kick lately), and I do feel better when I eat normal food, i.e. living at home over the summer. It's impossible to get good food here on a regular basis; the choices are either the dining hall or the 'fast food' cafe. And the stuff at the dining hall probably requires a hazardous waste permit for them to dispose of the leftovers. (Don't eat the fish...)

* I will mention the teachers thought I had ADHD/ADD when I started Kindergarten. The school psychologist said no since I could sit there and concentrate on stuff I was interested in for however long it took for whatever.

(Major change was from EE to EET. It's like EE, it's as hard as EE, but we actually make bright blue flashes and shut the lab down until we find someone with the keys for the utility closet, as opposed to playing make-believe on the computer. Nothing infuriated me more than to find out the EE control systems stuff was ENTIRELY in Matlab. The professor for that class, as nice as he was, was about as helpful as a brick.)

[profdlp]

...when I start to think about how old I am and how much money was flushed down the toilet on the way...
Been in that boat myself. The thing you have to keep foremost in your mind is that there is absolutely nothing in the world that can change that, then put your efforts into making the most of the rest of your life. Any time spent ruing what's already done just detracts from the energy you need to put into getting back on track.

I don't mean to sound preachy - If I am preaching, it's mostly to myself. ;)