If you wish to be a "rockstar" (or even a good coder), clarity of thought and good design count for 80%-ish of a coder's productivity. Many programmers spend their time throwing gobs of code at poorly designed systems. To get to a place where you can see your problems clearly and then execute them in an optimal fashion, I recommend that you take lots of walks, daydream, throw away inferior solutions, and most of all reflect on what you've done so far and what you've learned.

It's a long journey to get really good at anything, and even at the apex of your skills there'll be others much better than you. Curiosity and reflection will be your best friends here, and this post says you're turning to them in a state of crisis. Good. Keep it up and find your own answers.

Oh yeah and everyone's right, you're working too hard.

Life is a game of reward optimizations, and much of what humanity does seems to be attempting to "game" the rules; get ahead at all costs, ignore the affect on the long-term survival of the species. The clippy thought experiment asks the question: "Can we change our own reward?"

The actions you point out (environmental destruction, short-sighted carbon policies) optimize very clearly for an individualistic reward; it's in the best economical interest of a few to chop down forest / continue to burn coal / take your pick. And just as clippy can't seem to stop building paperclips while the world burns, we can't seem to stop optimizing for money/sex/domination while our future darkens.

But if you shift the reward function -- and it's not that huge of a shift -- from "win at life" to "long term survival of the species as a whole", these actions are very clearly unproductive.

So how do we change the reward score calculation?

No, the Clippy thought experiment asks the question: "might we accidentally build an AI that kills us all?"

It's not a very complicated thought experiment, you know. Not hard to interpret.