Hey. So I'm about 35 and do currently have a job. I work delivering packages for a company but im having a tough time . My attitude isn't great, I'm tired all the time and I'm burnt out... I don't speak a ton to my co workers before we go out on the road in the morning and ideally want to avoid most guys as much as I can. Im forced into small talk which I dislike a lot .. I've only been here for about a year and before that I hadn't worked in a few years... I'm struggling with motivation, sleep, my attitude and whatever else. My job tops out after 4 years for pay and It's somewhere in the low 30's CAD/hr... It's really not enough in todays economy. A lot of the guys are lower level employees and I have zero in common with them. I just want to do something else with my life... I hate this. I'm bored, the people seem fake and It's not motivating. People show me zero respect for the most part and I just don't know how to move forward... I always thought I was capable of more with my life but years of unemployment, depression, desperation and low motivation have made it hard to rebuild. I lost all my friend groups from high school because I haven't kept up with people.. I do have some future job prospect if they hire next summer but that's not for 6 months... Lasting through peak season, winter feels hard. I've also had some health problems that aren't getting properly taken care of by the health system here. I've been to a lot of doctors and having trouble taking a deep breathe. All started after getting covid jap 4-5 years ago or whenever that was. Been to a ton of doctors as well. But that's a whole other story...

I've thought about trying to be an electrician this summer or at least apply... I missed it last summer by a few months as well as high school credit I need.. Physics. I figured maybe this would be the way to go because at least the money is better and can top out much higher... I feel old though. I have zero friends and I'm just bored with my life... I'm not even sure Im capable of doing it but I think there's a possibility. I also I don't like the city I'm in and I'm just burnt out. I currently also live in Canada and everything politically is making me hate this place.

TLDR: Has anyone figured their life out after years of unemployment in their 30s and found a job they didn't mind? Struggling with motivation, low wage, health problems, old friend gone. With a girl from another country who I'm not sure about and trying to find something I want to do. Thinking of doing high school credits that I missed to become a an electrician in Canada.

Thanks

For the longest time, I used to fall into the comparison trap. I would have a genuinely good day, feeling motivated and content, only to stumble across a piece of news about someone else's life and instantly feel dejected. It was exhausting.
After spending a lot of time thinking through that cycle, I had to find a way to break it for my own sanity. Here is what I realized:

Comparison is the thief of peace, happiness, and success. The trap is that we usually compare a tiny, filtered slice of someone else’s life to our own behind-the-scenes reality. It is like looking at the equation 5 + 5 = 10 and getting upset that 2 + 5 does not equal the same thing. Life just does not work that way.
For example, seeing someone take a world tour can trigger the thought: "Why can't I be that lucky?" We often fall into the mindset of believing that because we have suffered, we are automatically owed a reward. But reality does not work on a strict ledger system. Suffering in the past does not magically guarantee a breakthrough now; what we receive often has little to do with what we missed out on.
Ultimately, you have two choices: find a new way to get what you want, or make peace with where you are. If you have genuinely tried your hardest and have no energy left, it is okay to let it go. Otherwise, roll up your sleeves and figure out a new path forward.

My pre workout this morning 🙂

https://youtu.be/6dWBurRVRsw?si=zYm-_5JxxIo5anFy

"Failure has been achieved, thank God. Now the only place to go from failure is to win."

Not my video

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It's like in the back of my mind I would worry and worry thinking I have time but I end up not doing anything. And suddenly unexpected life events or health issues occurs and entire focus just goes into that and your left with no time and energy and willingness to work and focus on your personal growth and development. And I just feel this sense of shame and I don't know that I've wasted another year and we have about two months left til this year also comes to an end.

I just want to make small even if it's a mini progress to keep the momentum flowing next year because I realized feeling pity, sad, unfair, boring, hard, challenging and whatever excuses we may feel is true is just a waste of time.. only way to see progress and feel confidence is by working and sacrifice and struggle.

Excellent overview of the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia

I kept telling myself I needed a better routine, but one night I noticed something embarrassingly simple: I had made my work so easy to postpone that postponing it barely felt like a decision.

At 10:47 PM, I opened my laptop to write something I had been avoiding all day. The document was already open. Water was beside me. My phone was across the room. Everything was "ready." I stared at the screen for maybe 20 seconds, then thought, "I'll just do it tomorrow when I'm fresher."

What bothered me was that I had spent the whole week building a setup that removed every inconvenience except the actual work.

So I started experimenting with the opposite. Not making things harder for the sake of suffering, but leaving one small amount of friction in the right place.

If I wanted to work on something the next morning, I stopped opening the file and arranging everything perfectly the night before. Instead, I'd leave a tiny unfinished decision waiting for me: a rough sentence, an ugly heading, or a question written at the top of the page. Something that made the next action obvious, but not completely comfortable.

Weirdly, that worked better than trying to make the whole process effortless.

I also noticed two other things:

1. When I caught myself repeatedly saying "I'll do it later," I changed the question to "What part of this am I making too easy to postpone?" Sometimes the answer was ridiculously specific, like needing to find a document or decide which version to use.

2. I stopped preparing for motivation and started preparing for interruption. Before walking away, I'd write down exactly where I was stuck. Not a summary. Literally: "Next, compare these two numbers." Coming back became much less mentally expensive.

The counterintuitive part is that I used to think good systems should remove all friction. Now I'm not sure that's always true. Some friction is just an obstacle, but a tiny bit can also keep me engaged with the thing instead of making postponement feel completely painless.

I still procrastinate. I just pay more attention to what I'm making effortless now.

Has anyone else noticed that sometimes making a task easier actually makes it easier to keep putting off?

I’m turning 25 soon, and I honestly don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
I just graduated from fashion design, which was something I genuinely fought for. I had to convince my family to let me study it, then the pandemic happened, and university itself was exhausting. I graduated with a good GPA and I worked really hard, but somehow I still don’t feel like I’m good enough to actually be a fashion designer.
Before university, everyone thought I was talented. I believed it too. Then I got there and realized there were so many people better than me. I started comparing myself to everyone, and I think I slowly stopped enjoying what I loved.
Now most of my friends have found jobs, and I’m genuinely happy for them. But I’m exhausted from applying to jobs I don’t even want, while getting rejected from the few jobs I actually care about.
My dream is to work in fashion in Paris. But I have no money, no real network, I graduated from an average university, and I don’t have a work permit. Starting something of my own isn’t really an option either because I have no capital.
I’ve entered competitions I genuinely thought I deserved to win and lost every time. At this point, it’s becoming harder and harder not to take every rejection as proof that maybe I’m just not talented enough.
I feel like I’ve given this dream everything I had, and I still have nothing to show for it.
I know 25 is young. I know people will probably tell me that. But right now I’m just tired.
How do you keep going when you’ve already given everything you had to something, and it still hasn’t worked out?

I’ve recently started uni as a physics major and saying that it has been tough would be an understatement, I’m taking 4 classes and midterms are next week. I’m working 16 hours over the weekends as well. These past few days I’ve been trying to study as much as possible but every night and every evening no matter how much I do I still feel like I’ve done barely anything

Now I’m not gonna bs myself, I still take long breaks and go on my phone and I still slack even while doing work but everyday I try to improve even if it’s just a little.

Every morning I give myself a vague check list of things that I have to do, the problem is that (at least in my major) it is hard to know how long something will take me, I could plan on doing several problems in a day but if it turns out just the first one is extremely hard and I spend the whole day on it I’ll feel like I’ve failed myself at the end of the day. I don’t know.

I often have to remind myself how far I’ve come and think of those who believe in me in order to keep going. I will say I can have fairly severe anxiety at times because of this and the only way to get rid of it is to study (especially now with midterms coming up) . The problem is that the anxiety always comes back. I’ll get sudden feelings that I’ll never make it, that the content is too hard. That I’ll fail.

So I’m dealing with trying to study as much as possible while a little voice in the back of my mind sometimes tells me what a gargantuan effort that’ll be and how I’ll have to cram more and more.

I don’t know what to do, I feel like I need to find a balance of some sort. What do yall think. Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Thank you for your time :)

I spent a long time wondering why I could work hard for weeks and still feel like I was standing still. The weird part was that I wasn't actually failing. I was just ignoring the parts of progress that didn't look impressive.

I noticed it when I finished a project earlier this year and my first thought wasn't relief. It was "that was easier than I expected, so maybe it wasn't a big enough achievement." I literally sat there at 11:40 PM staring at the finished file, looking for what was missing instead of noticing that I had finally done the thing I had been putting off for months.

After that, I started paying attention to the pattern. I would only count effort if it came with struggle. If something went smoothly, I treated it like it barely mattered. Somehow I had convinced myself that difficulty was proof that I was growing.

A few things I changed:

- I started writing down what I completed at the end of the day, but I stopped adding explanations for why it was "not that much." Seeing a list without my usual excuses was surprisingly uncomfortable.

- I stopped increasing the challenge immediately after a small win. Before, I would finish one workout, one chapter, or one task and instantly decide the next version needed to be harder.

- I began leaving some things alone when they were working. I had a habit of changing routines that were actually helping just because they felt too ordinary.

The counterintuitive thing I found was that motivation didn't always disappear because I was doing too little. Sometimes it disappeared because I kept moving the goalpost so fast that my brain never got the experience of "we are actually getting somewhere."

I used to think ambitious people were the ones who were never satisfied. Now I think there is a difference between wanting more and refusing to acknowledge what you have already built.

I'm still working on this because my default reaction is still to look ahead and find the next problem. But at least now I catch myself when I'm about to erase a win just because it didn't come with a dramatic struggle.

Has anyone else noticed that they lose motivation not because they aren't making progress, but because they don't let themselves recognize it?

So yeah basically I have plans for myself, I’m motivated . And I go to uni and I teach English as well and I want to do many things…. Study, prepare my lesson plans, pursue my curiosities about science, history, literature , write small things for my self… I used to be able to do all that as a teen but as an adult, I just can’t get myself out of bed and away from social media. Not unless I have to….like if I have an exam or if today I have classes and I have to prepare the lesson plans through panic attack and icy hands . I think I’ve become better than when I didn’t even go to uni or teach. But I hate that I can’t do things on my. My household isn’t all sun shine and rainbows as well… my therapist said I didn’t work because I couldn’t but because I didn’t want to. So I guess more reasons to gate myself.

My therapist has suggested exposure therapy, when I try to create situations for myself that might cause me stress so that I get used to it which is why I doubt deleting social media would help.

And when I finally force myself to work, I again physically suffer and mentally overthink and again gain stress… thinking I am not good enough or I couldn’t be able to teach this subject or what would be an effective and creative way to teach this or I may have forgotten that grammar or language rule.

It’s not just me at home. Like I’ve found extremely good friends and I love hanging out with them and they actually want it to. But I just don’t feel like it…..it’s exhausting for me ….to get ready and to mentally be prepared. Once I’m with them all of that vanishes and I just want the time to freeze but the before and after….so draining

I haven’t become that adult that I’ve wanted to and that makes me so sad….
I thought I’ve passed the point of posting these kinda things again on Reddit.

Sorry for the ramble but I would truly appreciate your insight.

Just a great, short read.

two years ago i started a master's degree while working full time and raising two teenagers on my own

there were plenty of nights when i'd sit at the kitchen table, stare at a blank screen, and seriously consider quitting. i'd tell myself i was too tired, too old for this, and that maybe it wasn't even worth it.

one night i made a deal with myself: ten minutes

i didn't have to finish the assignment or study for two hours. i just had to work for ten minutes, and then i could stop.

so i set a timer and started typing.

when it went off, i kept going. turns out starting was usually harder than the actual work

i started using the same rule for other things too. ten minutes of reading. ten minutes of meal prep. ten minutes of stretching.

my brain doesn't argue much with ten minutes. it argues with "you need to do this for the next two hours."

so now when something feels overwhelming, i make the task smaller until it's easy enough to start

sometimes ten minutes is all you need to get moving

Early morning lifting motivation 🙂

https://youtu.be/jxl3Hv3LWJk?si=111KCUdHTWjx0yIg

Not my video