Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.

There have been a lot of struggling anonymous posters asking for help lately. As I join those ranks, I hope that I am not straining the community's patience too much.

Here goes:

I'm not burnt out. But, from my vantage point, my problem--whatever it may be--is no less dangerous or frustrating.

Please bear with me as I try to describe what is wrong with me; it seems that clarity slips away more quickly to the extent that I grasp at it.

The problem is one of dissonance and stagnation.

I live an amazing, beautiful, privileged life, but I am unhappy, and my increasingly desperate flailing has not changed a thing. After graduating college at 22, I was hired by a Fortune 500 company as a developer, with a $60,000/year paycheck. I had high hopes for the next few years: Getting in shape, paying off student loans, and programming on the side to finally implement some of the many ideas (both technical and business) that I have collected over the years.

Now, three years later at 25, none of those things have changed. I poured much of my energy into a relationship that I ended near the beginning of the year, but even without that on my mind, I simply cannot seem to overcome inertia. I am still overweight; the fantasy of being debt-free is still a distant mirage, and I am still making the exact dollar amount as when I started; my ideas have languished, tinkered with at best, and utterly ignored at worst. In three years, I have learned a lot about myself, and about how to survive in a corporate job, but the goals I set out as a fresh college graduate have been brutally neglected.

The symptoms are all things you have heard before: I am often melancholy, having struggled with depression for most of my life. Focus is rare; I was recently diagnosed as having ADHD by a psychiatrist, who I saw at the urging of my therapist, despite my staunch refusal to acknowledge it as a real disease. I don't Get Enough Done, and I have to work extremely hard to avoid browbeating myself about every little failure, whether it is a failure of productivity or nutrition.

It's not enough for me to just exist. I feel a deep desire to build, to create, to learn, to teach, and as the weeks and months drag by with no discernible progress made on many of these fronts, my agitation grows.

I've tried many things. Therapy helped a little, but it's been over a half a year and it doesn't seem to have changed much. Prescription psychotropics, of which I have tried only two, had no effect. I picked up martial arts to get some physical activity, and while I am in marginally better shape, it has not "solved" anything. I do my best to eat better, but it's as easy to lose focus on planning my meals and learning to cook as it is to lose focus on coding my latest idea.

I have a difficult time relating attempted solutions because I'm still not sure what the problem is. I am not always sad. I am not always unproductive. I still talk and laugh with coworkers at lunch. I still see movies with friends. Once every couple of weeks, I'll have a few hours or maybe even an entire night where I crank out some code. I've learned to just barely squeeze by at work, excelling enough to win the approval of my peers and superiors. But, I know that I'm not even approaching my full potential. Sometimes I spend entire 8-hour days browsing the internet instead of working, even as I consciously berate myself for slacking off, or procrastinating, or whatever it is that I'm doing.

Sometimes I feel deeply ashamed when I read stories on HN, because there are stories of people who achieved absolutely incredible things in the face of adversity: People who created businesses while destitute; people who built families and careers simultaneously; people who got things done even when they didn't feel like it. Even when life got in the way.

Meanwhile; I'm an intelligent, healthy, gainfully employed bachelor, completely in control of his life, and I can't even put together the simplest of my hundreds of ideas in 3 years. 3 years, and I couldn't lose a couple of pounds. Life has been so good to me--I should be leaping out of bed with a giant grin on my face every single morning. And yet, I mope. And yet, I procrastinate.

It's as if I understand all of this in my head, but don't really believe it in my heart, and have no idea how to convince myself otherwise--as if the wrong "me" is in control 90% of the time. It doesn't feel right that so many things are such an uphill battle, and I don't understand why I'm squandering the incredible opportunities afforded by each day. I'm ashamed at how little gratitude I seem to have for my situation. My early twenties are over, and I haven't really done anything. The idea of looking back when I'm 30 and having these same thoughts makes me literally shake with terror.

What am I doing wrong?

The flailing itself is almost certainly the problem. The faster you move, the faster you drown. Strive to do nothing for a time instead - neither work, nor distractions. You've probably been led by the nose towards your high-achiever position in life, and now you have to stop, take in the world, and learn how to actually take control of things.

'losing weight', 'paying off your debts' and 'implementing your best ideas' are monolithic, far away, abstract goals...The kind of goals humans are bad at attaining.

Get smaller, immediate goals and work from there. Stop drinking soda next week. Stop eating sweets the week after. Apply that to everything. Think in weeks and days, not in years.

Smaller goals have many benefits. They take less time, they are easier to do, they give you results faster, and the reward you feel for 'completing a goal' is the same.

In before "Write an app to help you focus".

Take this as an opportunity to know yourself and how to hack yourself. You're at the front door right now; your agitation says that.

I suffer from a lot of the same problems -- ultimately, that feeling that you're phoning it in, and that you can't get yourself to stop doing it. Oh, BTW, I'm about 20 years your senior.

I have not entirely conquered this, but I understand myself a lot better than I did before I started trying. You can, too -- understand why it is you behave this way, and who this "other self" is that seems to be in control.

In all likelihood, the root of your problem is fear. It's the cause of many peoples' problems, and certainly is mine. You're probably afraid of failure, afraid of somehow breaking your in-born talent. These are needless fears, but I've got them, and I know how real they seem. One tool that has helped me identify my fears is Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. The book is good, the audio is even better. She's a PhD, a psychologist who's spent her career figuring out how to overcome fear.

Another suggestion: start a light exercise program. Don't attempt anything heroic. Just a daily (six days per week) fast walk for 25 minutes will do. It's not just about losing weight -- in fact, that would just be a by-product. The main reason is that as a human being, you were born to run. Your mind will be healthier if you exercise your body, regularly. A great book on the science of this is Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John Ratey. The last 20 years of research in this area have shown an amazing connection.

Others here can help you with your long-term goals: create great things. I can't give much useful advice in that area, yet. What's important, though, is that you grow into self-awareness, in order to gain control over what I believe is probably a low-grade depression -- I'm not a psychologist, but I think I know it when I see it.

Where the mind goes, the body will follow. Conversely, where the body goes, the mind will follow. If you start behaving like someone who feels better than you do, you'll start feeling better. Your body can make your mind improve, and your mind can make your body improve. Trying a bit of both.