About a year ago I realized that I had deeply misunderstood how I was best motivated to do things. From Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile:
My idea was to be rigorous in the open market. This made me focus on what an intelligent antistudent needed to be: an autodidact—or a person of knowledge compared to the students called “swallowers” in Lebanese dialect, those who “swallow school material” and whose knowledge is only derived from the curriculum. The edge, I realized, isn’t in the package of what was on the official program of the baccalaureate, which everyone knew with small variations multiplying into large discrepancies in grades, but exactly what lay outside it…
Again, I wasn’t exactly an autodidact, since I did get degrees; I was rather a barbell autodidact as I studied the exact minimum necessary to pass any exam, overshooting accidentally once in a while, and only getting in trouble a few times by undershooting. But I read voraciously, wholesale, initially in the humanities, later in mathematics and science, and now in history—outside a curriculum, away from the gym machine so to speak. I figured out that whatever I selected myself I could read with more depth and more breadth—there was a match to my curiosity. And I could take advantage of what people later pathologized as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) by using natural stimulation as a main driver to scholarship. The enterprise needed to be totally effortless in order to be worthwhile. The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether—when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement. The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom.
(I confess I still use that method at the time of this writing. Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.)
Try going to a library, looking through the shelves, and finding a book that captures your attention. Then start reading. Read only as long as you're interested. Then direct yourself according to your interest, within the possibilities afforded by the library. Don't look at electronics. I was surprised by what I found.
Motivation is caused by interest, usually from anticipating some combination of novelty (explore) and results (exploit). If you're not motivated, you might have no novel or important possible actions, likely because you're artificially constraining your action space. A way to solve this is to simply try sampling from the space of actually-possible actions, and picking the one that most interests you. Then iteratively chain or resample as soon as you get bored. Your intuitive sense of 'interestingness' is a surprisingly good way to steer. If you learn to trust yourself, you can find practically infinite motivation for exploration - although, at that point, 'motivation' isn't really the right word anymore.
Another mechanism to achieve a similar effect is to let yourself become bored by not allowing yourself to take any stereotyped or consequentialist actions. See Tsvi's Please Don’t Throw Your Mind Away:
- Your mind wants to play. Stopping your mind from playing is throwing your mind away.
- Please do not throw your mind away.
- Please do not tell other people to throw their mind away.
- Please do not subtly hint with oblique comments and body-language that people shouldn't have poured energy into things that you don't see the benefit of. This is in conflict with coordinating around reducing existential risk. How to deal with this conflict?
- If you don't know how to let your mind play, try going for a long walk. Don't look at electronics. Don't have managerial duties. Stare at objects without any particular goal. It may or may not happen that some thing jumps out as anomalous (not the same as other things), unexpected, interesting, beautiful, relatable. If so, keep staring, as long as you like. If you found yourself staring for a while, you may have felt a shift. For example, I sometimes notice a shift from a background that was relatively hazy/deadened/dull, to a sense that my surroundings are sharp/fertile/curious. If you felt some shift, you could later compare how you engage with more serious things, to notice when and whether your engagement takes on a similar quality.
See the post for more justification. Especially: "Highly theoretical justifications for having fun"
Though these two excerpts have different aesthetics, they both point in about the same direction. Try looking for what actually interests you. Try playing, if you haven't in a while.