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I have a major problem with boredom and hopelessness in my life, and some intelligent outside help from the fine folks at FDR could be mighty helpful. What follows is a summary of abortive career pathways. To provide context, I am in my early 30s. Right after high school, I did a bachelors in chemistry, followed by a masters degree in chemistry. The original goal here was to pursue a doctorate in chemistry, but after watching my colleagues spend 5-8 years of their lives performing repetitive experiments, followed for many by 2-4 years of post-doctoral fellowships (more of the same at a slightly higher pay), l decided to complete a masters degree instead. Although I have always been prone to depression, I did not begin to procrastinate or succumb to apathy until near the end of my masters degree, and even then it was still fairly mild in intensity. Although the lab work in grad school did not appeal to me very much, I really enjoyed teaching (in this program, all grad students taught undergraduate chemistry labs and drop-in problem solving sessions). After doing some reading in the areas of psychology and psychiatry, as well as dating a masters student in counseling psychology, I decided that it would be fun and rewarding to try to teach people how to solve challenges within their own lives. Even at this point in my life, while a political conservative in worldview, I saw how dysfunctional the public school system is, and had no respect for the training in education degree programs (B.Ed.'s), so a career as a high school chemistry teacher was ruled out. Additionally, my mother was a clinical social worker who told me stories of her work, which always sounded interesting, even if conducted within a clearly dysfunctional public mental health system. I now think that I was given an unwarrantedly positive view of psychiatrists by my mother, and a somewhat negative view of clinical psychologists. So after finishing my M.Sc. in chemistry, I rather naively set off for medical school as a means to the end of becoming a psychiatrist. If other interesting career options within medicine caught my imagination while on that road, so much the better. So, I was in medical school for three years with a goal of pursuing a career in psychiatry. When I began my medical school career, I was not a libertarian (much less an anarcho-capitalist) and more or less fully bought into the propaganda behind conventional psychiatry. This has changed substantially, and my goal in medical school was modified into my current goal of doing training in psychiatry, augmented with additional training in psychotherapy, in order to become a direct pay psychotherapist who might have used medication sparingly. I succumbed to apathy and boredom after a few months in medical school, as well as depression, and was unable to continue after struggling for three years in this endeavor (actually four years if you count an additional year of undergrad I took in order to improve my GPA). After washing out of a mind-numbing stint in medical school, I've set myself the goal of becoming a direct-pay psychotherapist. In order to pursue this, I'm now back taking undergrad courses in psychology in an attempt to prepare for graduate training in clinical psychology. Right now I am finishing one semester out of a necessary four semesters needed to apply to graduate school in clinical psychology. However, after the novelty of this change of environment wore off (within about three or four weeks), I find myself not caring at all about the content, thinking the next two years of undergrad psychology will be boring and mostly useless (in terms of useful knowledge), and suspecting that graduate training in clinical psychology will be contain more boring and mostly pointless content delivered at a faster pace, as in medical school. Not coincidentally, I find myself constantly procrastinating on what should be easy work. Sometimes I think of trying to enter the workforce with my masters degree in chemistry. When I look at the entry level white collar job market, I see myself being lucky getting an insecure, poor paying job doing mind numbing work as a lab technician. I feel so trapped, with a voice in my head saying I have no good options. Any pathway will result in mind numbing tedium, eventual burnout, and surrounded by propagandized/emotionally damaged people incapable of talking about anything but tedious trivia. All this while the economies of the world continue their slow collapse, and the emerging Fourth Reich continues to grow. This is not the mindset that I want to have, but therapy has not been useful in turning me to a more productive direction. I would be ever so appreciative of any thoughts on this situation.