I'm completely demotivated to work; what can I do?

I went through this phase of the British school system some 14 years ago, just as the AS/A2 exams were being introduced. I'm a very technically minded person, but I found school's treatment of these subjects to be intensely boring. I found it hard to pay attention and not be distracted by some more interesting or immediately rewarding passtime such as programming.

While much of the A-level material is presented in a tedious manner, there are other books and sources available beyond your curriculum and I encourage you to seek these out. Applied topics such as computer science and engineering simply assume that you have a good grasp on the fundamentals. Books such as The New Turing Omnibus give you a taste of lots of topics, find some you like and dig deeper. Try and find some exciting, applied use of the boring school math, or chemistry, or phyisics. Find books and resources which guide you through learning rather than just reading Wikipedia.

In summary, try to find the cool things that can be accomplished with the fundamentals you learn at school and you'll be more motivated to work through the tedium. Don't be afraid of "degree level" texts. Try to stay away from any programming that involves drudgery and focus on enlightened, mathematically-inclined tasks: learn Haskell, implement fundamental algorithms, find hard problems like SAT, fourier transforms, optimisation. Find something which requires the skills you learn at school but which is exciting enough to hold your attention. Do lots of little things.

> I'm two years before heading off to university, but I have no motivation to learn the things that are being taught at college.

Personally, that was a really tough time for me in my life.

> I chose to study the subjects that I thought I would enjoy, but sadly this isn't true.

That happened to me too.

> I'm assuming that if I had made other choices for subjects, I'd be in a similar problem.

Maybe; it's hard to know where other paths would have led.

> Maths is one of the subjects I'm studying, and although I enjoy maths itself, I'm not enjoying what I learn in school.

I had that same experience. That's why I studied maths on my own, outside of school (I consider programming a subset of maths.)

> I can't be motivated to put the work in, so that I can get good results at the end of the year.

Same thing happened to me.

> I spend my free time programming or researching instead,

That's also what I did. Studying philosophy also helped alot :-)

> but I can't continue doing this if I want to get the A-levels I need to enter a half-decent university.

I found my high school to be very oppressive, so instead I went on academic strike and programmed for fun. I almost flunked out of high school, and only got into one university that has a tradition of accepting everyone.

It was all for the best. I'm not saying you should do that. But, it was the path I needed to take. You can live a wonderful life regardless of what academic success you achieve or fail to achieve.

Older people have a bad habit of advising younger people they need to do very specific actions in order to achieve very specific goals.

In this ancient tradition, I will now offer you very specific advice ;-)

(1) Ask yourself: do you desire the goals you are told to desire. What are your goals? What do you actually want from life?

(2) Once you have your goals in mind, your advisors will usually be conservative. That is, their advice usually describes one path to your goal --- not the only path. For example, if you want to go to a half-decent university and an advisor tells you, "you should try to get straight A's" --- then your advisor is being conservative. Yes, if you get straight A's it will be easier to get into a half-decent university. But it's not the only way. Furthermore, younger people are often more creative in finding ways to sidestep tradition.

(3) Ask for lots of advice, but only listen to advice skeptically.

(4) Don't be afraid to "Go ahead and fail." http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-20/go-ahead-let-your-k...

> Are there any ways by which I could motivate myself to study more?

I would caution against trying to coerce yourself into being more motivated. Follow your own path. When people give you advice it's up to you to take it or leave it. Even this advice.

I'm relatively young and often fighting myself to get things done as well. I've taken steps to force myself away from distracting things and focus on stuff that needs to get done. For example, I've installed a website blocking extension on Firefox and blocked sites I'm drawn towards from 8am to 5pm, also uninstalled all other browsers (I have broken and installed chrome just to procrastinate, since uninstalled).

Right now I have a 1500 word paper to start but am stalling and finding a slow cooker recipe for dinner.

Nearly every day I am fighting myself to be productive, it can be pretty painful in its own way. I figure if I'm ultimately winning(being productive) then I am making some sort of progress in my personal growth.

What you said there is the main reason I know I have to push myself. I know if I don't then I'll just end up being disappointed in myself.

So, essentially, fear is what drives me.

Lots of people hit depression in college. See a doctor. You may not be sleeping enough, drinking too much, sleeping irregularly, etc, all which can cause depression

There's another side to this line of reasoning. Sometimes, things feel tough because you are simply on the wrong track: Studying and working on the wrong things, have your ambitions set too high, working the wrong way (hard, not smart) or just push yourself too hard. If this happens to correctly describe the difficulties you have, the right answer is to ease off a bit - not just buckle down and push harder.

Which of these situations you're in at any given time is a difficult question which can't be worked out from three sentences written on a web forum. I would hazard a guess that given the "curse of the gifted", the former is more common in kids just out of High School. But I have often seen the latter as well, including on Hacker News. Both these situations can turn into mental health issues if you don't take them seriously.