How do you break out of the spiral of doing nothing?

Who actually likes going to work? - A phrase we hear all the time, usually from childhood on, from our parents or grandparents. Work is generally seen as a necessary evil rather than something that can also be fun and contribute to a fulfilling life. Most of us run into the problem of having no motivation, or in plain words simply "no desire" to work, quite early in life. And we don't even have to talk about extreme cases, such as adults who have been unemployed for years and have no motivation to do anything about it. The phenomenon of "no motivation for work" sometimes shows up in young students, too, for example those about to graduate who then don't know what they should actually do with their lives. If you're one of those who at least have a high school diploma in hand, you usually face the next step after graduation, which often leads to college. But what should you study? That question naturally depends on what you plan to do for a living later on. But what if you have no motivation to go to work at all and no idea what could be fun for you? These are all questions that can't be answered quickly or in a one-size-fits-all way. In the next step, however, we want to look at the problem in a bit more detail.

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Finding out your own interests

It sounds so trivial to talk about getting to know your own interests. In practice, though, it usually turns out to be no easy task. Of course we can say what we enjoy right here and now, but when the question becomes what we'd like to do for a living later and how we want to earn our money, suddenly we're no longer so sure whether what interests us at the moment is really something we want to do long term.

Be ready to fail and take risks

Basically, you will never get a 100% certain answer here. Especially when you're young, you still have so much life ahead of you and will gather so much experience along the way that it's almost impossible to figure out at a young age what you want to do for the rest of your life with 100% certainty. Instead, you should listen to your gut feeling and be willing to make mistakes. That means you should try to find something that interests you and pursue it. Only when you finish something, whether it's college or a trade apprenticeship, can you know in the end whether it was the right or the wrong decision. So at the end of the day you'll benefit more from taking a risk and seeing it through than from dwelling forever in a state of thinking and "what if." Apart from that, when it comes to "no motivation for work," there are of course extreme cases, too, involving people well into adult life who are permanently unemployed and still have no motivation for work. Here, unfortunately, it's hard to bring change into these people's way of thinking from the outside.