This document is a highly fleshed out version of this post.
The main audience for this is those who feel unmotivated or lost or depressed. It's what I did personally to get myself unstuck. Note: this isn't advice, and even if it was, you shouldn't take advice from a person in his mid-20s. This's closer to "my current life philosophy", and it's a living document that will look ~nothing like this by the time I croak.
Goals (or desires or values) lie somewhere on the spectrum between terminal and instrumental. Money's (nearly always) an instrumental goal: it gets us other things we want, like sustenance, shelter and luxuries. But if you were to try to explain to me why you like sour foods or why you enjoy seeing your friends succeed, you might find it surprisingly difficult. This's the hallmark of a terminal goal: it's an end in and of itself, and doesn't require justification in terms of other goals it helps fulfil.
Terminal goals are your grounding. They're the roots of the mental structure undergirding your motivation, and they're the true underlying reasons why you do everything. If you don't know what your terminal goals are, you should really get to it. If you haven't yet, your options are to either...
Most people don't know what their terminal values are. This might sound surprising, but it's actually the default state of the world. Your desires are opaque to direct introspection, and require you to pay attention while you try many things out. Most people either don't pay attention or don't try many things out.
Good news: most people did try out many things, but just didn't pay attention. And what that means is you don't have to settle for trial and error: just seeing a description of various desires is often enough for you to consciously recollect that which you subconsciously already learned to be desirable.
Tangent: this's actually what happened with me, which's probably why I'm so sure it can happen with other people. Went on Twitter one day, saw this post, and instantly had a revelation about my own desires and what I had previously enjoyed in so many different activities, but just couldn't pin down. "Knowledge is not an end in and of itself." -> wait, "knowledge as an end in and of itself" is exactly what curiosity is -> oh, curiosity's the thing pushing me to do research: not just the potential practical applications of the work, but also that the knowledge's just interesting to me on its own -> huh, I wonder what other terminal goals there are that I haven't explicitly considered yet?
With that said, here's a non-exhaustive list of terminal desires that might be pulling you:
Some of these are related to each other, which I have (via this DAG editor) crudely and incompletely sketched out here:
Your job now, is to reflect on what your desires are. Look at the list, look at the image, and try to see if any of them speak to you.
Similar vibes: