Hello everyone. If you've been in IRC for the past few months you've probably heard me whine about this subject several times. Well, I decided to bother you yet again in this format in the hopes I can get some more structured responses. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Anyway, here's the self pitying gist of my life so far: during my first years at school I for whatever reason kept acting disruptive. Eventually my teachers found that by keeping me busy with work, I would not bother anyone. To their surprise, I completed everything at an accelerated rate, even managing to complete textbooks from the following year. The school then decided to let me skip a grade. Unfortunately, from that point on, my new classmates didn't like me and thus I became a bullied outcast all the way from 4th to 9th grade, despite having changed schools at one point. From that point on it stopped but the damage was done and I couldn't form friendships other than two or three. However, I kept soldiering on because I erroneously believed I was a genius, destined to change the world, a belief that persisted due to school in general coming easily to him. I was dumb enough to keep believing this despite the fact that while I was at the top of my class, I wasn't at THE top. When the time came to apply to college, I decided to apply to Aerospace Engineering because I had the childish delusion that Icould become an astronaut, this despite in retrospect not having that much of an interest in space apart from owning a couple of books on the subject. I got in despite the strict entry requirements and everything seemed to go along smoothly.
Then everything came crashing down.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, the "curse of the gifted" hit me full force. All of a sudden, the difficulty of school skyrocketed and I had zero work ethic. My grades plummeted along with my self esteem and overall sanity. Whereas the logical reaction to this was to DEVELOP study habits, which I certainly attempted, my subconscious decided to retaliate by developing chronic procrastination, which I already had to some extent but this time completely dominated my life. Thus, I am now on the verge of completing my course...after 7.5 years, whereas the course is 5 years in length. And with such undisciplined studying that my mom recently said to me "I don't know how in the world you managed to finish"
Which brings us to here: I am now tasked with writing my graduate thesis, something which has driven my procrastination to new levels. I can literally spend WEEKS not writing a SINGLE word.I have already surpassed the first semester deadline (in my defense, I heard practically no one manages to complete it in one semester) and hopefully I will complete it next year. But right now I find myself completely lost: my course supposedly has 0% unemployment but I have no idea where most of my classmates are working. I have lost all interest I previously had in this area (for example, I didn't even know about Curiosity until TODAY), I have no idea what interest I COULD pursue as a career and given my horrible procrastination habits I sometimes wonder if I am capable of ANY job AT ALL (though I can work as long as I feel like I'm being supervised or have someone else with me...which is why all this talk about the rise of telecommuting scares the crap out of me) Add that to the economy and I can't keep myself from falling into a spiral of hopelessness. I sometimes find myself looking for other things I could do but I can't keep from comparing myself to people who found their "passion" at an early age and feeling like I could never surpass them. Other times I find myself endlessly reading articles about how bad the economy is and how it may never recover, the "lost generation", how climate change will destroy our way of life, and other things...
...I don't know what to do. Anyone has any advice?