Eckhart Tolle says that most of the time we walk around with just enough attention to keep from bumping into each other.

Maybe you could try mindfulness training. It is one systematic way of increasing your attention on the moment. I've found that it has actually helped me develop my creative talents, because I now notice more details. It has also helped me learn to control my emotional responses in stressful situations (awkward, confrontational, whatever). I would try that before drugs, as there are no adverse side-effects of this training. :) Making lists also helps, but nothing has permanently changed my day to day routine and helped me stop avoiding the boring tasks of life like mindfulness.

Good luck.

This is for the person who can never find a pencil. We had the same problem at our house. There was never a pencil when one was needed. I finally solved the problem by buying a gross of pencils and scattering them over every possible surface. Want a pencil? There's one in that drawer. Which drawer? Doesn't matter. There are at least two pencils in every drawer. There are pencils in the silverware drawer and the drawer with the cat brushes and the drawer which contains candles. There are pencils in the makeup drawer in the bathroom. When the pencil ubiquity quotient gets low, I replenish them.

After a while of this, my husband (who is the real culprit since he sketches with them constantly - as far as I can tell he used to eat them after picking them up to sketch) got sick of pencils everywhere and figured out how to put the pencil he just used back in a cup on his desk. There is now a giant cup full of pencils on his desk, and I am gradually tapering off the supply of pencils. I haven't heard "Why can't I ever find a bleepity-bleep PENCIL?" for over a year now. Sometimes a brute force solution does work.

Dear Spacey,

It sounds like you may be somewhat disconnected from yourself and others. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to reconnect. Before getting into that, a bit about what may be going on.

Everyone feels the disconnection you feel... and there are some basic ways to deal with this sense of alienation or fear or whatever you want to call it. Some ignore it. Some feel that someday (when they have x) they will overcome it. Some are disabled by it. Your approach has been to build logical systems.. good for some things, but not for managing a wandering wallet.

Turns out much wallet-managing is done without logic: better tools tend to involve more emotion and even literal gut feel.. tools that will ultimately serve your relationships as well.

Remedies for how you feel, btw, have been packaged into grand psycho-spiritual disciplines, most notably hinduism and taoism (e.g. "zen buddhism"). Although you may find benefit from these disciplines, you may also find them full of people who like to system-build.. people appropriately drawn to the discipline who eventually returned to their old selves.

To keep this note short here are some labels and sample authors: for connection to yourself consider things like intuition (Myss), flow (Cikzentmihalyi), gut feel (check out the literature on this wacky subject).. martial arts also good. For connection to others try loving kindness meditation, increasing your oxytocin (hormone that rules sense of trust. those on autism spectrum -aspergers, which has symptoms like yours- tend to have low oxytocin) by getting a massage or feeling somehow you're loved or in a womb (swimming can help).

btw, you may find it helpful to consider working with this a 2-hour/day discipline. Don't shortchange yourself! :) Keep in mind your tendency to systematize and compare: jump in a learn what works by experience.

Have fun.

You cannot be absent minded without a mind. What is absent in your case is minding what is needed to carry you through.Yes you can be totally occupied with thoughts on fixing a program or rewriting a complex code and this does not mean you are absent minded.It is important to etch into your thoughts survival requisites as would a visually impaired man keep his stick or a hard of hearing guy would cling to his hearing aid.your situation is not unfamiliar to me,it is a comfort that someone lives like my first son and the difference is realizing the fact.That is exactly common sense.You wrote about the problem and sought advise and this is common sense with a drive for becoming a mundane normal person.My son on his mission of Phd in history after degrees in Engineering,Environmental science,Economics,Internal Relations at 36 is like you but worse since he hates any reference to his ways of keeping his belongings and attitudes towards infractions that cost money.I think you will be fine in couple of years with some bumps though

Maybe you were better able to cope when you were younger simply because working against the grain of who you are hadn't yet worn you down.

Maybe you're nudging yourself, in the only way you know how, towards the more difficult, but more rewarding, option of following a life of creativity.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with you after all. Maybe you're just in the wrong system. Maybe, for once, your life is starting to go right.

Just a thought.

LW, You are sleep deprived. If you have all this stuff in your life, time consuming stuff, how are you ever going to get a job done? I'll bet you managed to schedule your day in all those schools you attended. Now that you are out in LIFE, do the same thing with your job.

Your employer doesn't owe you a living, he owes you a paycheck for work performed. It's youir job, not your daydream or napping center. This sounds like the work habits of people who are taking drugs, darting from one thought and task and idea yet never finishing anything.

Carey should have recognised the signs. It's pretty glaringly obvious to me.