The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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So, I was in a pretty similar position to you, though my procrastination and absenteeism started in middle school and never really cleared up. My last year of high school I was going to class less than once a week to hand in assignments or write tests and spending the rest of my time at home reading, programming, or playing video games. The school tolerated this because I got an exemption from a psychiatrist (who I was forced to start seeing after I said, basically, "If I have to waste another fucking year of my life in that place I'm going to end up killing myself," to my mother when explaining why I kept skipping class.)
The psychiatrist diagnosed me with "social anxiety" which I didn't agree with at the time, and still don't, but I played along because it at least meant being able to graduate on time.
I moved out at 18 to go to college. Predictably, it did not go very well. While the coursework was trivial (freshman CS) the profs were hardasses about attendance, so I dropped out after two semesters. Moved back in with my mom to her great disappointment and did odd jobs to make my student loan payments and help with rent. (Picking apples in autumn and a part-time gig at the butcher's shop she worked at for the rest of the year, mostly. I didn't have trouble with showing up to these jobs for some reason.)
If discipline (conscientiousness?) is a Real Thing then I'd wager I'm <1st percentile. Whatever standard script typically engenders "work ethic" in people was completely ineffective on me; the only thing that's motivated me to do things I actively don't want to do is an overwhelming sense of panic and imminent fear of disaster. This is a pretty severe character flaw, there's no sugar-coating it, and I haven't been able to overcome it except in brief spurts. I've tried a friend's Vyvanse prescription: it seemed to make it easier to initiate annoying tasks, but I wasn't in school or working full-time, so I have no idea if it would've been effective in those scenarios, and it may have been placebo to begin with.
I'm 29 now, and unfortunately I never found a satisfactory solution to this problem; I gave up on the "standard" normie wageslave life a long time ago. Post-COVID, online courses and remote work might be a viable means to cope with the issue -- when I was in college, the idea of an online class being remotely equivalent to a "real" one was pure fantasy. You can, apparently, even get student loans for them now. I found my own personal success (such as it is) in other ways: I made a decent chunk of money in crypto early on (ironically using some of the student loan money which I'm still making the minimum payments on -- the interest rate is so low, it's the only Rational(tm) choice) and multiplied it with some Wallstreetbets-tier investments. The COVID years were particularly kind, and Nvidia secured the bag, so to speak. This was enough to live independently and comfortably (though not lavishly) for the foreseeable future.
This came out as more of a blackpilling post then I expected; I don't know that I have any advice per se, as "get lucky with crypto 8+ years ago" is not exactly actionable. That said, if you aren't able to solve the root of your issue (as I wasn't) it's worth considering more unconventional coping methods, e.g., finding some way to make enough money to achieve your goal of living independently. You are clearly very literate, fluent in English, intelligent, and an American citizen: this combination alone puts you ahead of a lot of people, and there has never been a better time to make a living on the internet. If your morals are at all flexible and you have a bit of risk tolerance (and if the alternative is "getting kicked out and eventually living on the streets", well...) there are many roads available.
Probably not the answer you were looking for, but (personally) the NEET life is great, if you can find a way to make it happen.
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