28 june 2019
Where has all my motivation gone?
I haven't really felt up to working for at least a couple weeks, if not a few months. It's not that I don't find my work interesting, because at a high level, I do. I just don't want to be the one doing it. I want to work on cool things, things that actually impact more than just a small community, or things that I actually get paid well for.
There's a new project here that I want to work on, but I opened the source code and just scrolled for a few minutes before closing it. The trouble is, there's some interesting aspects to it, but it's locked behind a lot of tedious work.
I think maybe there's a loneliness aspect to it. Usually, even during the summer, I'm at least spending time with others in the office, but lately it's just been me. I try to stave off some of that by talking online or by working in a coffee shop, but it doesn't really help me much. I end up just wasting time and not really getting much done.
I want to invest more in myself and get myself to a point where I can actually apply for jobs (albeit, in at least a year when I get my grad degree). But the thought of setting up a LinkedIn or making a website that doesn't suck just takes all that motivation away.
I don't really know the fix for this. I think it comes down to a lack of discipline which I normally fix through social obligations. (i.e. I normally get things done because I know someone else is depending on it and I want to impress that person. I don't really feel the need to impress my current main coworker that I never see anyways).
My fiancee is wanting to start going to school again which I think is great, but now I'm worried about finances. We had talked about her starting in the Spring or even next Fall, but she's gone ahead and applied for a community college nearby before we could really talk about it together. I get why she wants to go there: she feels stuck and wants to work somewhere that her coworkers are a little more friendly and respectful of her. Totally understandable and I don't want her to have to work there if they're making her feel really unwelcome.
The only trouble is that she's the kind of person who can't work and go to school at the same time. It's pretty much a one or the other kind of thing. This means that I'll be the sole income provider and, well, grad students don't make much money. I make enough to break even, but only if we cut back on a lot of our spending. We're both guilty of spending frivolously at times, but she's a little worse at managing money than me, partly due to growing up in an upper middle class household while I grew up in a lower middle class one. When your outlet is "buying clothes" while growing up, you don't really manage money well.
So now I'm trying to figure out what the best way forward is. Do I pick up a side job? Do /r/beermoney things? Donate plasma? Make her work too? (and pretty much accept that she won't do well in school; not that she can't, but that she has decided she can't do both).
Maybe I'm just upset and that's souring my thoughts. I really don't want to push her to not take classes and work on her degree, but I also really don't want to feel like I'm being stepped all over.
Her not working won't really affect the income rate for us, because most of her income is used for god knows what (clothes, makeup, expensive glasses lens that she didn't need), while mine is towards bills and groceries and occasionally going out to eat. However, her going to classes will mean that we have one more bill, essentially.
Yeah, I think I'm still a little upset about this.
I'll try to decompress some and try to talk to her about these issues. If I read what I wrote above, that's the advice I'd give, so I think I'll try it.