I am pretty far from having fully solved this problem myself, but I think I’m better at this than most people, so I’ll offer my thoughts.
My suggestion is to not attempt to “figure out goals and what to want,” but to “figure out blockers that are making it hard to have things to want, and solve those blockers, and wait to let things emerge.”
Some things this can look like:
Critch’s “boredom for healing from burnout” procedures. Critch has some blog posts recommending boredom (and resting until quite bored) as a method for recovering one’s ability to have wants after burnout:
Physically cleaning things out. David Allen recommends cleaning out one’s literal garage (or, for those of us who don’t have one, I’d suggest one’s literal room, closet, inbox, etc.) so as to have many pieces of “stuck goal” that can resolve and leave more space in one’s mind/heart (e.g., finding an old library book from a city you don’t live in anymore, and either returning it anyhow somehow, or giving up on it and donating it to goodwill or whatever, thus freeing up whatever part of your psyche was still stuck in that goal).
Refusing that which does not “spark joy.” Marie Kondo suggests getting in touch with a thing you want your house to be like (e.g., by looking through magazines and daydreaming about your desired vibe/life), and then throwing out whatever does not “spark joy”, after thanking those objects for their service thus far.
Analogously, a friend of mine has spent the last several months refusing all requests to which they are not a “hell yes,” basically to get in touch with their ability to be a “hell yes” to things.
Repeatedly asking one’s viscera “would there be anything wrong with just not doing this?”. I’ve personally gotten a fair bit of mileage from repeatedly dropping my goals and seeing if they regenerate. For example, I would sit down at my desk, would notice at some point that I was trying to “do work” instead of to actually accomplish anything, and then I would vividly imagine simply ceasing work for the week, and would ask my viscera if there would be any trouble with that or if it would in fact be chill to simply go to the park and stare at clouds or whatever. Generally I would get back some concrete answer my viscera cared about, such as “no! then there won’t be any food at the upcoming workshop, which would be terrible,” whereupon I could take that as a goal (“okay, new plan: I have an hour of chance to do actual work before becoming unable to do work for the rest of the week; I should let my goal of making sure there’s food at the workshop come out through my fingertips and let me contact the caterers” or whatever.
Gendlin’s “Focusing.” For me and at least some others I’ve watched, doing this procedure (which is easier with a skilled partner/facilitator—consider the sessions or classes here if you’re fairly new to Focusing and want to learn it well) is reliably useful for clearing out the barriers to wanting, if I do it regularly (once every week or two) for some period of time.
Grieving in general. Not sure how to operationalize this one. But allowing despair to be processed, and to leave my current conceptions of myself and of my identity and plans, is sort of the connecting thread through all of the above imo. Letting go of that which I no longer believe in.
I think the above works much better in contact also with something beautiful or worth believing in, which for me can mean walking in nature, reading good books of any sort, having contact with people who are alive and not despairing, etc.
I am pretty far from having fully solved this problem myself, but I think I’m better at this than most people, so I’ll offer my thoughts.
My suggestion is to not attempt to “figure out goals and what to want,” but to “figure out blockers that are making it hard to have things to want, and solve those blockers, and wait to let things emerge.”
Some things this can look like:
https://acritch.com/fun-does-not-preclude-burnout/
https://acritch.com/boredom/
Physically cleaning things out. David Allen recommends cleaning out one’s literal garage (or, for those of us who don’t have one, I’d suggest one’s literal room, closet, inbox, etc.) so as to have many pieces of “stuck goal” that can resolve and leave more space in one’s mind/heart (e.g., finding an old library book from a city you don’t live in anymore, and either returning it anyhow somehow, or giving up on it and donating it to goodwill or whatever, thus freeing up whatever part of your psyche was still stuck in that goal).
Refusing that which does not “spark joy.” Marie Kondo suggests getting in touch with a thing you want your house to be like (e.g., by looking through magazines and daydreaming about your desired vibe/life), and then throwing out whatever does not “spark joy”, after thanking those objects for their service thus far.
Analogously, a friend of mine has spent the last several months refusing all requests to which they are not a “hell yes,” basically to get in touch with their ability to be a “hell yes” to things.
Repeatedly asking one’s viscera “would there be anything wrong with just not doing this?”. I’ve personally gotten a fair bit of mileage from repeatedly dropping my goals and seeing if they regenerate. For example, I would sit down at my desk, would notice at some point that I was trying to “do work” instead of to actually accomplish anything, and then I would vividly imagine simply ceasing work for the week, and would ask my viscera if there would be any trouble with that or if it would in fact be chill to simply go to the park and stare at clouds or whatever. Generally I would get back some concrete answer my viscera cared about, such as “no! then there won’t be any food at the upcoming workshop, which would be terrible,” whereupon I could take that as a goal (“okay, new plan: I have an hour of chance to do actual work before becoming unable to do work for the rest of the week; I should let my goal of making sure there’s food at the workshop come out through my fingertips and let me contact the caterers” or whatever.
Gendlin’s “Focusing.” For me and at least some others I’ve watched, doing this procedure (which is easier with a skilled partner/facilitator—consider the sessions or classes here if you’re fairly new to Focusing and want to learn it well) is reliably useful for clearing out the barriers to wanting, if I do it regularly (once every week or two) for some period of time.
Grieving in general. Not sure how to operationalize this one. But allowing despair to be processed, and to leave my current conceptions of myself and of my identity and plans, is sort of the connecting thread through all of the above imo. Letting go of that which I no longer believe in.
I think the above works much better in contact also with something beautiful or worth believing in, which for me can mean walking in nature, reading good books of any sort, having contact with people who are alive and not despairing, etc.