This is one of the hardest aspects of depression, one which I'm struggling with right now again, actually.
Having been in this place many times in my life, my best advice is:
Do things first. If you do enough things, passion will flow from that.
(wouldn't hurt if those things were plausibly interesting or valuable to someone).
The natural alternate philosophy is much less likely to work, which is: wait or or look for things you are passionate in, before investing effort. This is more likely to support a catch-22 cycle of depression.
But, the mind doesn't actually work this way. Nothing is objectively worthy of passion. Successful movie stars get bored of fame. I've listened to researchers passionately fulfilled by studying literal garbage.
Our brain learns to find meaning in things as we invest and explore them.
Our feelings and values change over time.
When depressed, you predict you will never feel better, or care more about things. That sort of prediction is empirically very unreliable for depressed people.
This is one of the hardest aspects of depression, one which I'm struggling with right now again, actually.
Having been in this place many times in my life, my best advice is:
Do things first. If you do enough things, passion will flow from that. (wouldn't hurt if those things were plausibly interesting or valuable to someone).
The natural alternate philosophy is much less likely to work, which is: wait or or look for things you are passionate in, before investing effort. This is more likely to support a catch-22 cycle of depression.
But, the mind doesn't actually work this way. Nothing is objectively worthy of passion. Successful movie stars get bored of fame. I've listened to researchers passionately fulfilled by studying literal garbage.
Our brain learns to find meaning in things as we invest and explore them.
Our feelings and values change over time.
When depressed, you predict you will never feel better, or care more about things. That sort of prediction is empirically very unreliable for depressed people.