This is closely related to the cognitive psychology concept of “agency”. CBT and its variants are essentially agency-training programs — they teach people to notice where they’re treating controllable things as uncontrollable, and to act differently. The efficacy data for these is solid and the effects persist. What you need to develop agency (morale) is to simply put work in something that turns into a success. That first win doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be real and self-attributed (not luck, not someone else doing it for them). That’s basically the whole mechanism behind behavioral activation in depression treatment — you don’t wait for motivation, you engineer small achievable actions and let the feedback loop rebuild itself.
And I do think something I’m updating on is how much bad jobs fuck you up. Like a friend of mine is in a weird situation where he gets less than 20 hours of work a week (this is a fulltime position) and even that work seems very pointless. He claims it’s a great deal because he can just watch tv in his off time… but he doesn’t actually seem happy. And I think having a lack of “wins” probably has something to do with that. It’s also hard because at this point, I’m not sure how realistic finding a different job is for him. He can’t really point to skills gained or accomplishments at his current job and he’s depressed and doesn’t really have the confidence to sell himself in an interview. So...
This is closely related to the cognitive psychology concept of “agency”. CBT and its variants are essentially agency-training programs — they teach people to notice where they’re treating controllable things as uncontrollable, and to act differently. The efficacy data for these is solid and the effects persist. What you need to develop agency (morale) is to simply put work in something that turns into a success. That first win doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be real and self-attributed (not luck, not someone else doing it for them). That’s basically the whole mechanism behind behavioral activation in depression treatment — you don’t wait for motivation, you engineer small achievable actions and let the feedback loop rebuild itself.
And I do think something I’m updating on is how much bad jobs fuck you up. Like a friend of mine is in a weird situation where he gets less than 20 hours of work a week (this is a fulltime position) and even that work seems very pointless. He claims it’s a great deal because he can just watch tv in his off time… but he doesn’t actually seem happy. And I think having a lack of “wins” probably has something to do with that. It’s also hard because at this point, I’m not sure how realistic finding a different job is for him. He can’t really point to skills gained or accomplishments at his current job and he’s depressed and doesn’t really have the confidence to sell himself in an interview. So...
He needs a better hobby than TV.
Unfortunately it’s very difficult to make skills learned from hobbies legible to potential employers.