Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time

> Because of all this, I realize that my existence is not special in any way. I am just some other soul lost in the crowd, not glowing in any way. Some day I will die and the world will not have been better or worse because of it.

The notion that "humans are special" and "individuals are special" is exactly part of the problem. We are conditioned to believe that we are special, the carrot being that consumerism/producerism makes us "special", whereas "not being special" is perceived as "something very bad".

Why exactly is that?

Thing is, the existential angst you feel is exactly the stuff that has sparked the Great Age of Philosophy starting with Immanuel Kant and David Hume.

Without going into details, try to turn your thinking around on this one. Why would it be bad that your existence isn't "special" as far as the Universe is concerned? I can assure you that none of the famous dead are laying awake, fretting over whether or not their lives have mattered in the course of History, for instance.

Some people even go so far as to deconstruct their own Self by continuing this line of reasoning. Ego Death is a thing (and it doesn't necessarily involve the usage of LSD).

Turn to yourself instead and construct meaning for yourself. If you want to feel purpose, special and a sense of self, the best thing you can do is validate your own Self. Who you are, what you like, what you dream of,... regardless of what society expects from you. It's called "self love".

> I will never even be close to what Elon is and accepting this is hard.

And I can assure that Elon Musk isn't happier or unhappier then you are. You are not Elon and and Elon isn't you.

He has to deal with the crushing pressure of a few companies that are highly demanding. He has to deal with the complexity and the ethics. He has also to deal with the demands of a very large family (I don't know how much his own kids actually see him, for one, or what their relationship is like)

My point is that the image of you have of Elon and walking in his shoes are two very, very, very different things. And the latter might be far more and harder then you are bargaining for.

There's a difference in being inspired by him and applying his level of audaciousness to your daily life in a sensible manner; and trying to emulate him in a way you can't possibly hope to attain. Guess what will yield the best chance for happiness and purpose?

> I believe few people would care at all about this.

Are you sure? As that your (irrational) beliefs talking, or have you actually done a survey across a representative sample of humans, excluding your own biases, in order to determine this?

I have travelled across the globe a few times now, and having met many, the optimist in me tends to believe that most people do care if you talk with them in earnest. It's just not the image we tend to see as powerful people have invested in a system that games our biases, fears and desires again and again.

As someone with acute ADHD and prolonged childhood trauma, Gabor Maté is a godsend and I'd recommend this book as well.

>Short term reward seems to overrule long term planning and goals if the outside pressure is not there and we have a choice.

I think the emphasis is wrong here. Short term rewards overrule long term planning when there isn't room for long term planning. In modern society, it's not that long-term planning isn't emphasized enough, nor that internal will towards it isn't strong enough. To the contrary, we're bombarded with messages encouraging instant gratification. You'll notice that many long-term initiatives are bolstered by offloading either the physical effort or the cognitive load onto others: construction and farming are highly-mechanized and specialized jobs; retirement planning is done by experts, as is healthcare; education is a matter of enrolling in a program that figures out timing and curriculum for you.

Of course, this paradigm favors individuals who have wealth.

The idea of community is neither a panacea nor a platitude; it's a structural schema for offloading personal effort onto people who are concerned but dispassionate, routing around both issues of money and of direct biological impetus, thereby reducing the individual and collective load. Any workable solution to a systemic problem such as this is going to include other people, so we need to stop looking at it as a per-person engineering problem.

Were people in the old times happy and satisfied, because I would argue it is in human nature to never be satisfied because it makes us evolve. We can only counter this by hacking us chemically.

The actual offense is making handwavy statements like 'we're drugging kids for not wanting to concentrate on things they're not interested in'. ADHD is not as simple as that. And for people affected by it, even interesting things are often physically impossible to concentrate on - it's incredibly frustrating and a debilitating condition to live with without medication (depending on severity, of course). A different environment wouldn't solve the problem.

Aside from all that, I agree that forcing everyone to conform to the narrow range of 'normal' in general is less than ideal, but since this is the way current society is structured down to its very basis, the idealistic idea of turning that on its head is probably not very helpful to those presently impacted by it.