I used to struggle with motivation. Especially at your age (I'm about to 30). Motivation is a byproduct of discipline. You need to integrate some kind of discipline in your life.
Something huge that changed my work ethic was when I bought a whiteboard. I always have two lists on it. One of the lists is "Everything I need to do." This has things like 'pay my taxes by X date', 'call my insurance company and find y out', 'start this project', 'build that dream car i have always wanted to build'. Some of the stuff might always be on it, at which point I can start really looking at those things and figuring out whether I plan on doing them, how bad I want to do it, and if it's worth my time vs the other stuff I want to do.
The second list is titled "Today", and always leads with today's date. Under that are things that I should really do today, or at least try to start. Some times the things on it roll over to the following day, sometimes they get dropped back into the larger 'everything' list. But when I do something, whether it's "Take out the trash", or "Call Person X", I get to cross that thing off the list. It stays crossed out for the whole day until that night when I reassess my everything list, erase crossed out items, change the current date, etc. It has helped me stay on task and get things done tremendously. The whiteboard has had a tremendous impact on my productivity.
This is a completely separate problem than the GP poster described, and comes off as rather insensitive too, considering they described, yknow, getting on medication to fix their broken neurochemistry.
I'm serious sir/madam, few good insights ever come of the form "You have $difficult_problem, you just need to do X to solve it".
Personal example: I get done the stuff that I need to do, but for a good chunk of it, I hate every single minute of it. Example: I just got done with a number of uni assignments - they were not difficult, the material wasn't uninteresting, but I already knew the info, I already knew I already knew the info, so going through the motions to actually get credit for it sucks. As in "God, I wish I was doing just about anything else right now"-level sucks.
The way they described that bolt of "ugh" that stops any motivation to do anything substantial? That is my fucking life right now, and I can't put down into words how much I want to get that part of me changed. All the whiteboards and organized-ness and "discipline" in the world only ensures that you're getting things done (going through the motions) - it does nothing to ensure that you will enjoy the process or even necessarily the results of the process.
If you hate everything you have to do, what's the point in living?
How do you know IkmoIkmo has broken neurochemistry? People with ADHD struggle with motivation. But perfectly normal people struggle with motivation too. There's a difference, but can you see it in a fifty-word post on the internet?
As for the drudgery of University and crappy assignments- what, do you imagine "neurotypical" people love to do banal assignments that are below their skill level? Everybody hates make-work.
The risk with all this is that manic depression, ADHD, etc are mostly an extreme form of things we all experience, so it's not hard for people to convince themselves they have it.
As for finding enjoyment- University can be a slog. But I found once I had climbed high enough (and managed to drive myself to do the un-fun parts) it became rewarding. The thing is a lot of school is building foundations; the fun part comes later. That said, if your major is completely un-fun, you should reconsider your track. E.g., as much as advanced math was a complete chore for me, I knew I loved to design circuits, and I tinkered with them through all of University.
You haven't known "God, I wish I was doing just about anything else right now" until it's June, sunny, and 75 outside, and you are sitting through a four-hour-solid lecture on linear algebra. But it was worth it.
I called out the wrong post (actually it was derefr), but I know they have broken neurochemistry because medication greatly reduced the impact of the problem.
You don't understand what I'm saying here - there's actually "banal", and then there's applying that description to any action you could be doing at this moment.
A round of TF2? Meh let's try it.. nope, still bored. Go through my bug backlog on a couple of personal projects? Open the IDE and.. eww, forget that. Going for a walk? Boring.
All of these things are things I legitimately enjoy doing, it's just that more often than not, there's a lack of enjoyment there. Sufficiently stimulated, that problem almost completely goes away (large amounts of caffeine, energy shots, etc).
I really, truly doubt that this description of mental state is "normal" for most people.
> do you imagine "neurotypical" people love to do banal assignments that are below their skill level?
Actually, yes. I say this for the simple reason that dopaminergic stimulants make banal things fun, with a linear correlation to the degree of their dosage. Everyone loves cleaning their apartment on enough Adderall.
If the dopamine-receptor-deficiency hypothesis of ADHD holds true (and it's a far stronger hypothesis than anything about depression et al.), then dopaminergic stimulants will act to emulate the neurochemistry of someone whose dopamine "set point" is naturally higher.
Or, in other words, a person with ADHD, taking a properly-calibrated dose of an ADHD medication, should experience the same level of motivation as a neurotypical person.
Which implies that if there is something that a particular dosage of a dopaminergic stimulant makes enjoyable, then people who naturally produce the same amount of dopamine endogenously will also find that task enjoyable. There are people who just love cleaning their houses, love banal assignments, love paperwork and bureaucracy. ("Love" being a bit strong—they experience no pain from it, and can get into a flow state from it somewhat like a video game. They probably won't say they enjoyed it, but they probably won't say they feel like they wasted time, either.)
The weird insight one gets from this is: if dopamine-receptor imbalance forms a normal distribution (as many people have more dopamine than is neurotypical, as have less), then there are a whole lot of people walking around who really enjoy make-work. And some of them make policy decisions.
Not objectively/absolutely banal. Relatively more banal, compared to the things people with ADHD can enjoy doing. There is a margin of things that are banal to people with ADHD but not to neurotypical people, just as there is a margin of things that are banal to neurotypical people but not to manic people. (Have you ever seen a crackhead picking at the floor trying to find bits of crack they might have dropped? [A common sight in my city, if you're wondering.] They can do it for 30 minutes with no chance of finding anything, not getting the slightest bit bored. Banal!)
On another note, you argue 'few good insights ever come of the form "You have $difficult_problem, you just need to do X to solve it"', but right before that you say "getting on medication to fix their broken neurochemistry." Is that not an example of "you have $difficult_problem, do X to solve?" You sound young and confused. It will pass.
Maybe qualifying the phrasing makes it more useful: few good insights come of the form "you have $difficult_problem, you just need to do [thing that is easy enough to try that if you were interested in solving this problem you've probably tried it long ago] to solve."
Getting on a medication is hard, and frequently shameful. It especially requires acknowledging, first, that you have a problem to a degree where you should seek help with it, rather than that you just "prefer to" be lazy. Because of this, people who have motivational problems don't tend to try the solution "getting on medication to fix their broken neurochemistry" until a whole bunch of evidence piles up to suggest that's the way to go.
An economist would say that, because the market is efficient, there is no money left lying on the ground—if you think you see some, it's either a fluke that will correct itself, or an illusion. Likewise, there's no "one simple life hack" that will actually solve any common, chronic problem humanity faces. If there was, it'd have reached fixation as common wisdom long ago. (For example: brushing your teeth to avoid them rotting away. It's a "life hack" that works!)
The only time something can be both "one simple life hack", something few people know about, and actually work, is if it's really hard to put it into practice. Practicing epistemic rationality is a "life hack" for avoiding wasting time, but you have to read tons of things and route around a bunch of your own neural circuitry to make it happen. Moving to another country is almost always a "life hack" for getting better job and relationship opportunities, but it requires uprooting a lot of your existing life. Etc.
The only "easy/surefire wins" in the market of personal health/well-being/productivity, are the ones you'd never try on a whim because they have too much of an upfront cost. The art, then, is in convincing yourself to feel "desperate" enough to try those things early on, rather than wasting time with the patent-medicine-style life-hacks first.
Or, in short, and by analogy: in a nutrition store, all the stuff that is known to work, is locked behind the counter. Things that work, unsurprisingly, have side-effects; frequently the side-effects are in fact simply corollaries or restatements of their effect! Anything with no side-effects, no costs, is extremely likely to also have no effect.
Something huge that changed my work ethic was when I bought a whiteboard. I always have two lists on it. One of the lists is "Everything I need to do." This has things like 'pay my taxes by X date', 'call my insurance company and find y out', 'start this project', 'build that dream car i have always wanted to build'. Some of the stuff might always be on it, at which point I can start really looking at those things and figuring out whether I plan on doing them, how bad I want to do it, and if it's worth my time vs the other stuff I want to do.
The second list is titled "Today", and always leads with today's date. Under that are things that I should really do today, or at least try to start. Some times the things on it roll over to the following day, sometimes they get dropped back into the larger 'everything' list. But when I do something, whether it's "Take out the trash", or "Call Person X", I get to cross that thing off the list. It stays crossed out for the whole day until that night when I reassess my everything list, erase crossed out items, change the current date, etc. It has helped me stay on task and get things done tremendously. The whiteboard has had a tremendous impact on my productivity.