My mum thinks I'm a waster...

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Yeah... so uh... I think you guys are stuck on "voluntary work" having to be some formal thing. Most of the stuff I do is very informal and under the radar of unemployment services type of thing. I hooked up with a local guitar teacher who I thought was awesome and created a website with him one day. I went every day to his place and worked on this project for weeks on end. Once, I hooked up with this other musician and made a full blown documentary (90 min). Took a full year and a half to do it. Did not collect money but made this very worthwhile thing with work that I did. Nobody knew of this work. It was me contributing to a cause that I cared about using my special interests. It was not paid in cash but it paid off in far many other ways including helping launch me into my next paid for job through the network connections I had made.

The only volunteer work I do that I have made formal is my mentoring program for ASD youth. I did this for insurance reasons. Other than that it is all "under the table"...

The point is that I am doing for other people rather than just for me. I find (in general) the more people can do that the happier they are and the less the world thinks things of them like "waster"... It has less to do with money and more to do with how you are contributing.

You are supposed to declare the hours you spend working voluntarily. If you go over the amount of time allowed per week, you lose your money. If they find out you haven't declared what you are doing, you lose your money. The kind of very casual, very informal, very small amounts of charity work that you are likely to be able to do without engaging with a formal programme or going over the allocated hours is likely to have a negligible effect on your CV/ personal connections. That doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. It just means that the rules are not as conducive as they might be.

I often feel like this. I have a habit of screwing up and other people telling me that I am slow when I do. I get really irritated when someone has to show me the same things over again I feel so stupid. people will say to me "Dude you're so slow" or "dude you're an idiot" and I always got offended by this. I often think that I have a lower IQ than most people because of how mad I make them at me. And I would like to know if anyone else thinks that.