There is something about school itself that makes it unpleasant but I don’t think that is discussed in Objectivist circles. I think the key might be to learn to enjoy the journey, not just the destination. To enjoy each step of the process that gets you to the goal. I have no idea how to do this myself, but it does seem to make sense. It was something I was able to do in my early years.
Now, half a year after opening this topic and a lot of experiences richer, I’ll give you an update on my current situation.
I think I have finally found out what ‘it’ is. It was, as some of you suggested, a missing purpose or let’s say, goals that weren’t defined clear enough. I’ve struggeled a lot lately because in whatever way I tried to define my goals - I never quite started to actually work on them. There was a time when I was very depressed about all that: I thought I wasn’t capable of action. I had no trust in anything anymore: neither myself nor anyone or anything else. Once I put myself in a quite dangerous situation, I was ill and did something which I shouldn’t have done. It worsened my condition. I did it because I had told myself that I wasn’t really ill and that ‘being ill’ was just a lame excuse for staying in bed and being lazy.
I’m now starting to gain confidence once more. I have realized that I can interprete my feelings quite well and that I’m pretty good at recognizing my false rationalizations.
Back to what ‘it’ is: I have realized that when defining goals, until now I have always left an extremely important element out of consideration: time! When I have tried to define goals, I always thought about how to achieve them and what effort it would take to reach that goal. Then I already went on thinking about whether it would pay off, without conciously taking into consideration how long it would take to achieve the goal. I’m sure I did think about a rough time estimate unconciously though. I think that unconscious estimate was a pretty good one too - and that unconscious knowledge about how long it would take me to achieve that goal actually prevented me from reaching it - because I didn’t want to wait that long!
I have now found out that taking time conciously into consideration changes everything: the mere though of an achievement with a pretty good estimate is much much nicer. I even noticed that I am ready and willing to double my effort if the time until results of my work can be seen decreases. I have never been lazy and my goals were never the wrong ones: I’m just very impatient! Now that I know that, it’s only a technical thing about how to specify a time estimate for certain achievements. So the purpose of this thread is fulfilled, which is why i wrote this reply.
Thanks again for your replies and sorry for my English, I think it got a bit rusty since I’m out of school. 