I need more discipline
It's a really weird lesson to learn at my big age, but I do need to be more disciplined. A few years ago, I could blame big-web™ and Evil Meta™ for my distractions and my laziness and this that and the other.
But now that the reels are gone and the doomscrolling is taken care of, it becomes obvious that the problem is... me‽ (man i love interrobangs hehe) I've spent more time today staring out the window than I have actually working. The need for short term dopamine is simply replaced by watching my friends play games, or staring at a wall, or sleeping in.
There's really four big things I want to be doing: my part-time job, my research, my other research, and building a cool as shit website. And I haven't been doing any of them. I've always been a person of routine, and now that I no longer have anything in my day to anchor myself, it really all scatters like a necklace of fake pearls. This is part of why I want to be a perpetual student, to never have to come into contact with my piss poor planning. All this fulminating, just to get away from my research.