I ended each day of my old jobs exhausted, and never had the energy to do or try the things I thought I was interested in.
I am now in my mid 30s and find myself with a ton of free time. But I am finding I have no idea what I want to do.
Nothing that used to interest me interests me anymore. The things I think I might like I for whatever reason don't have the energy to do or try them.
I feel like I've been in survival mode for so long I dont know what my passions are. How do I find them again?
I didn't find my complement, but didn't mingle widely until later on, when jobs put me in contact with many.
A friend I met after changing coasts liked trains, but it was a good excuse to carpool to fishing locations near those lines. I couldn't fish worth a damn, but those were beautiful locations, and they revived my photographic bug.
Things do connect, but not in isolation. Hobbies, either by association, or just getting out, create opportunities.
Do with that information what you will, but it might be that you are looking at passion wrongly, expecting to 'find' something you are magically passionate about.
Beyond that, take care of your health, rest and play around with things to increase your surface area of finding something that works.
For instance I didn't really care about football until someone explained all sorts of details about the game to me.
You can also develop that appreciation by doing things. The more art I make, the more art I like. I had a brief and unsuccessful woodworking phase that makes me stop when I see nice joinery or beautiful furniture. Years of reading about plants and smelling flowers made my forest walks slower and much richer.
So I guess be curious? Seek a deeper understanding of many different things.
Thinking about this has become an endless source of misery for me. Still, every day I take on some challenging work and start working on it, whether it interests me or not. If it does not, I switch. If the next thing does not work, I try harder again.
I have also started talking to more people and trying to find a group of highly ambitious people. One thing I have noticed about people who have succeeded is that they nailed two things. First, they found a direction. Second, they found an ambitious group that acted as an engine for them.
Time does not matter as much as direction does.
The nature of work also combines passionate with non-passionate stuff. We may love writing high quality code, but most of the day requires hacky low quality code, meetings, or digging through documentation. Or part of a pipeline of gathering, cleaning, and selling data to a financial institution that uses it for medium interest loans.
The better measurement is find out what work energizes you. You might not feel any flow or fun. You might not feel any emotion whatsoever. But you get out of it like a good workout - both tired and energized.
I'm even thinking about quitting programming altogether. But I love it so much that, at the very least, it'll always be a hobby for me.
Then, are you looking for something that you are already passionate about, but are unaware that you are? Or are you looking to discover something to become passionate about?
Either way, talk to people - people at work, neighbors, people at church or the bar or the gym or the park. What were you talking about when you suddenly realized that you'd been talking for 45 minutes? You're pretty interested in that. Or, what was the other person talking about for 45 minutes, and you weren't searching for some kind of graceful way to get out of the conversation? You're pretty interested in that, too.