I used to have a Zip drive in my PC in high school -- I remember saving 3ds Max files to it when I was first learning to model. And Deadlock, a turn-based strategy game that came with some version of Windows, I copied it onto a Zip disk and distributed it to some friends. But as I remember they were too busy with Kingdom Under Fire and Brood War.

My daily Linux machine is a Thinkpad T430 from 2012.

I daily drive a 1993 Saab 9000 -- Can it run custom software? The electronics (HVAC, lights, wipers, etc.) are controlled by a Raspberry Pi, so kind of?

And some old phones lying around, including a working Razr and a Palm Treo that can still sync with Windows 10(!)

https://goo.gl/maps/UXrJePXbNNUZQG1H8

I feel seen

> I always seem to find an excuse as to why it's not worth continuing, *right before actually accomplishing anything* [emphasis mine]

Certainly "diminishing returns" and "the skill of consistency" are real issues, but is it also possible there's something psychological going on here, like a fear of success?

This is something I've struggled with for all of my adult life – not with success per se, but with the way succeeding at something defines who/what you are. For instance, way back when I was a freshman in college, I poured myself into a big assignment with singular focus, and created something that got a lot of attention and notoriety. Important people took notice, I won some awards, and everyone started asking what I was working on next. It felt great and I did start another big project, but quickly found myself crushed under all these perceived expectations... And although I finished it, the result was underwhelming. I sort of dropped off everyone's radar at that point, and I'm not sure I've ever really recovered.

Like other commenters have said, you could have written your post verbatim about me. I get into things with an initial boost of motivation that often borders on obsession, go deep down the rabbit hole, cobble together some sort of proof of concept, and then suddenly lose interest, as you described, right at the point where I could actually produce something.

So how do we get past this? Figuring that out may be my life's work. But speaking of life, one of the best tips that has helped me is, "If you want to figure out what to do with your life, work backward from your death". Which is to say, think about what your obituary will say, how you want to impact people, what your legacy will be. Then think about what you need to learn/build/accomplish to get there, and work your way, step by step, back to now.

It's not a perfect system by any means, but it does help keep me "on track" when I feel like tossing something aside because I suddenly lose motivation. I tell myself, This is how I get to point B, which goes to C, to D, to E. And the fact that I want "point E" is very unlikely to change.

The other tip I'll leave you with is: Trust your past self. You from [some time ago] decided [activity] was worth doing. So it probably is! It may not feel like that now, but trust that Past You made the right call about things, even if they may not have known the full scope of what they were getting into. I often struggle to put in another hour/day on some project I don't really want to do anymore, because the alternative looks so enticing: Start something new! Dick around on Reddit! Watch someone else do the thing on YouTube! Etc. So I remind myself that, for me 1) life isn't about relaxing; it's about doing stuff, and 2) when I do relax, I enjoy it so much more if I feel like I've "earned" it.

Anyway best of luck, friend. At least you've already learned you're far from alone on this!

Although I will say having my eyes immobilized also sounds scary. And I feel like I would constantly be "checking" that I still can't move them.

I'm with you 100%. I don't want to be there, but there I am. And sometimes it all feels utterly pointless – civilization, the human endeavour, everything. My particular slippery slope goes like this:

    Humanity is going to waste the one-time gift of fossil fuel accreting the already-grotesque hoards of a few hundred individuals. Then these people will die, nothing will have been gained on the whole, and instead of infrastructure which we could have used to pivot to some recognizable future, our descendants will be left with nothing but unrest and some variety of ecological hot potato. And then we will all die out or revert to a pre-technological state, and either way all the gains of science and human ingenuity will be lost.

I don't know what to do about all that, but usually I can convince myself that working on some tiny project to help things not go that way is a worthwhile effort. And of course it's pretty much all I can do.

Also here are a couple quotes that help me get out of such perspective ruts:

* "Even though I'm always in pain, it's worth sticking around to make my corner of the world a slightly better place." -Ricky Gervais' character from After Life

* "I cringe at my arrogance. Actually, cringing at my arrogance is just another, more rarified, level of arrogance." -Alison Bechdel

* "Goodness: You got to make it out of badness. Because there isn't anything else to make it out of." -Robert Penn Warren

I have a 48" RCA dumb TV from like 10 years ago and I live in perpetual fear of it dying. My list would be: HDMI input and some kind of speaker, although I'd be willing to buy an external speaker if building one in made a bare-bones setup impractical.

[Very relevant BlipShift t-shirt I saw today](https://www.blipshift.com/products/enable-2fa)

I'd love an electric too, but the way I figure it, continuing to use a fairly efficient vehicle that already exists is probably better for the environment than buying something new anyway. It takes a lot of resources and material to build a car.

Seems to me the problem is how the assignments are posed – If the goal is to create a program that does X, and I can do that by copy/pasting or tweaking something from StackOverflow, have I not completed the goal? But if what you actually want is for me to understand all of the principles behind a program that does X, well that's a very different thing. And the assignment should be set up differently.

It feels like Proctorio and similar solutions are treating a symptom of the real problem, which is that the way a lot of higher learning is administered is inherently flawed. And until we fix that, won't cheating and cheating detection be the same Coast-Guard-vs-smugglers arms race it's always been?