The Fallout of Being a Slacker.

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I may have posted something similar to this in the past, but I don't recall, and it's on my mind so I'll post anyway.

I am a slacker. Just for clarity, because I can not emphasize this enough, I am a slacker. I wake up, I go for my morning jog, which is a leisurely walk through the local cemetery, I make coffee, then I sit down and play video games or watch TV all day. Sometimes, I go to my friends houses to play video games and watch TV. I pulled a 2.0 GPA in high school, dropped out of college not once, but three times, and in the last ten years, I've had nearly three times that many jobs.

I'm not stupid. I have no idea what I currently rate IQ-wise, but I tested well into genius range at age ten. Since returning to college just over a year ago, I've been on the Dean's List two semesters in a row, and excelled despite taking intentionally difficult courseloads. Despite my lack of formal education, I've self-taught for years. I've received kudos for my work in science classes, mathematics (which I loathe), linguistics, and writing. I didn't even have to try hard. So what's the problem? What do I have to be moody about?

In August, I'm transferring to a full university. I will be going in as a sophomore, as only 24 credits transferred. I will be living in a school dormitory. I am twenty-seven years old, almost a decade older than my fellow students. I don't totally hate myself, and I'm not depressed, but I do hate a part of myself. I hate the part of me that once took a twisted pride in being a slacker. I hate the part of me that would prefer to plant his ass in a chair and play some Planetside 2 than get a job or actually achieve something. Unlike most self-loathing people, I am acutely aware of my qualities, and that pisses me off even more. I have no excuse. I am smart, I am talented, and I wasted it. When my peers were going to college and becoming young professionals, or backpacking through South America, or joining the military, I sat on my ass and played WoW. I could have had everything, and I threw it away for nothing.

How do I win? How do I compete with people who have accomplished leagues more than me at two thirds of my age? How can I get past having wasted a large portion of my time on this Earth, and in doing so wasted my talents? I will be going to school with young people who were in Gifted & Talented programs, Athletic programs, or who were forced to work from a young age because their families were poor (The school I'm attending has an extremely high population of foreign students). How can I look these people in the eye?

By letting go of the past and focusing on your goals and values now.
By not using labels to define yourself.
By giving up comparing yourself to other people. Life isn't a straight line, for no one. Comparisons of different life situations are therefore completely futile and irrelevant.
By letting go of the egocentric fantasy that everyone else went on to be successful and nobody else lost years of their life to something they didn't really want.
By redefining "winning".

I think I might be going through sometime sort of similar as you. Motivation is a problem. Is more where you are getting at, like it seems you have bad habits?

I've made a whole lot of sayings, one of them is.

Lazy people feel the most pains.

I've made a list of them. But I think maybe it's just enjoying what you do and being happy for motivation. Not sure...

...

Pretty much this, I think. I get whiny about it, but the only way to deal I guess is to put it behind me and simply outperform the whippersnappers as a grown ass man should. I do have a few points, though.

First, labels do define us. We can rail against it all we want, but we are labelled any time someone sets eyes on us. And why not? All a label is is a way of packaging and putting voice to a concept. A person who is lazy and lacks motivation is a slacker. A person who drives ahead relentlessly and achieves their goals is an achiever. They are two distinct concepts that deserve different descriptors, and by labeling ourselves, we identify that concept as a thing to be resisted or lauded.

Second, I must compare myself to others, because everyone else will be. I have to compete with these others, so tactically I need to size them up and see how I stack up against them. Every HR rep will be comparing me and my fellow applicants to see who the best fit is. Every girl will be comparing her suitors to see who is the most fit to be her lover.

And by redefining winning, how would I not be lowering my standards and weakening myself as a result? I suppose the idea is somewhat along the lines of "If yer still breathin', yer winnin'" as a dear friend likes to say, and respecting yourself for that, but how can I respect myself when I set the bar so low?

I don't mean to be contrary, but I really don't quite understand how those might be helpful?

The problem with labels is that you're establishing expectations that can and will only work against you.

If you label yourself a slacker, you establish the expectation of the behavior you associate with being a "slacker". So when there's an obstacle and you don't immediately how to procede, you run the risk of giving up early (because that's the kind of behavior you've identified with).

If you label yourself a "winner", and there's a moment or situation in which you don't feel you measured up to the "winner" label, all you can do is either chastise yourself, or make excuses (it's not really my fault that I failed) in order to keep your self-image intact. Both behaviors are detrimental to your well-being and only stand in the way of actually achieving your goals.

You gain nothing by labelling yourself either way.



Why do you want to live life as a struggle against artificial labels?



One does not follow from the other.



How exactly does comparing yourself with someone else help with either situation? The only thing you need to do is to understand what provides value. You may need to analyze successful people to understand what it is that makes them successful, but comparing yourself like you did in the "they're successful, I'm a slacker" way will only make you feel bad and create psychological barriers to what you think you can do.



The whole idea of setting a bar is counterproductive. As long as you insist to evaluate your self worth through the eyes of other people, you'll never measure up. There is no winning if you think like that. You're setting yourself up for a life-long fools errand, permanently being afraid of other people's evaluation (as you are now when thinking of meeting all those "successful" people at university), permanently trying to make a good impression instead of doing what is important to you.
"If yer still breathin', yer winnin'" is actually the only sensible way to approach this. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have goals - but they have to be flexible, and they should really be your goals and not something that was handed to you from the outside.
They have to be flexible because sometimes things won't work out - you can either accept that, or you can hardwire the idea of "winning" with particular goals and then become desperate and bitter because you didn't "win".

While I have never considered myself a slacker in the least, I am in a similar position in that, at 27, I'm only just now starting my first real job. Due to some setbacks in the employment department as well as several detours trying to find a decent job, I'm about 5 years behind my fellow coworkers in my position, as well as the people I graduated with. It does make me wish I had done things differently and started sooner, but in the end if I had the opportunity to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. All of those experiences, negative and positive, that I've had have helped to shape who I am today, and I couldn't have gotten to where I am without them.

I think that you should view your situation in the same way. You had several years where you made some mistakes, and realized that you didn't want to continue down that path. Use those experiences and learn from them rather than let them drag you down, you might be surprised at just how many lessons you may have learned from those experiences. And most importantly, don't devalue yourself as you seem to do in your post.

I'm a slacker, too. You should be proud. You got to hang out and play some awesome video games for years and got away with it. And now you're still going to get to have the whole college experience on top of that! Awesome.

Autism is a developmental delay, after all, and you might hit some milestones later than NTs. So what? Life isn't a race, and you're experiencing it for yourself, at your own pace. Unless you constantly mention your age, I find that younger people will simply assume you're close to their own age if you're in the same school or working the same level of job. Occasionally they'll find out you're nearly 30 and they'll be like whoa. But most of the time it's not an issue unless you make it one.

LookTwice, I totally understand your way of thinking, but I get fueledbycoffee's way of thinking too.
The problem I have is motivation and drive. If you set your own goals that are for you, that is fine. But it really does not give you much motivation and drive because you end up making them to easy, then you can't be bothered. Competing and winning, seems to be more of the way to go. The 'want' really gives you the motivation and drive, something that burns in you to succeed. It's very shallow and I know this, which kind of destroys my motivation and drive. But hey to me it seems that is what everybody is doing anyway, like everyone is trying to make themselves better than the next person. People feel superior of inferior to other people.

Like I said, I'm not advocating to give up setting goals. In fact, I think that's very important, and you should do so carefully. It doesn't matter how "ambitious" those goals are, as long as they matter to you. If you're not motivated by the goals you set for yourself, then they're not actually your goals (or there's some internal dialog going on that tells you it's not worthwhile even though it's not what you actually feel or think).
In my opinion, ambition isn't shallow at all, as long as you know why something is so important to you. Being passionate about something is what makes life worth living. If, on the other hand you're just trying to "make a lot of money" because that's what everyone else admires, then yes, that is quite shallow and in my opinion not going to make you happy.

All I'm saying is that putting your self-worth on the line by associating a certain goal with being a winner and not reaching it with being a loser is not a smart move.

You would have heard of the saying. "the harder the battle, the sweeter the victory"

This might seem radical to you, but actually I couldn't care less if I'm a loser. Losing doesn't really bother me. (slacker power maybe).
Also there are different levels of success if you aim really high, you will achieve more than if you aim low and achieve that lower goal. Emotionally you may lose out because you think that you failed because you didn't achieve the high goal, but really you will have achieved more materially.

You could always go into genetic research and redesign yourself to live twice as long.
Then you can achieve, be rich, and retire to do some more slacking
Seriously, its your life.
If you enjoy it and achieve contentment, who gives a rat's clacker what other people are doing?
Set the bar, but at the right height for... one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer.

None of those things you've mentioned - getting employed in some midle midle class (Orwell ftw) job; futzing around through a hot and wet hole like some Che Guevara that you don't understand, yet for the sheer lack of a better model do follow; taking the shilling as drunk peasents do - are worthy of being associated with the "having it all" sintagm. I kind of understand where you're coming from - you found yourself at a certain age and have nothing to show for it. I feel so myself. But if you would of done any of the things you've mentioned you would probably have the same exact feeling anyway.



My my... aren't we condescending.
Athletic programs - you mention that as a good thing - really??

Most people set up on a career path when they're well in their thirties. Just relax.

Forget what you did before, do what you are capable of doing, which sounds like a lot from your description, and don't become a slacker again.