motivation...I have none

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Can I have some of yours? I'll, umm, pay you back if you give me enough to make me want to get a job. :-p

Seriously though, a lack of motivation, in various shapes and forms, defines me. That is, above all else, what I feel is wrong with me. I was depressed for almost a decade, badly for a lot of it. I suppose I could still be depressed now, but if I am, it's nowhere near how bad it was. I want to live, I enjoy things, ergo I'm not depressed.
But as I eventually got away from being depressed, I didn't grow my desire to DO things back, not like I used to at least. The things I want are nearly all physiological desires it seems; food, sex, music. Not completely I want these, I spend a lot of my time lately on forums and reading, and I still find I like learning about human cognition and neurophysiology quite a bit. (but this doesn't mean I am anywhere near reliable enough to get a job or go back to studying this field.) And while I don't want to be a lazy bum, I'm too lazy for that negative reinforcement to make me change at this point.
Oddly, this is rather the opposite of when I became a much lazier person when I was depressed. To just give up and enjoy all the moments I could, without the pressure of succeeding at something, was huge. Also the release of pressure when I got my celiac diagnosis, that I wasn't malingering, was huge. All these negative things that were a constant part of my life, I eventually melted away.

But now, now that I'm not ridden by guilt, I've lost that motivation (awful as it was), to be normal. I mean, not unless my existence and creatures comforts were to be in the balance do I feel that I could change.

The problem with this is that there IS no diagnosis for my problem. I'd forgotten about it, but I often thought that I was addicted to nothing, an addict struggling to overcome something. And I still feel like that's the best way to describe it. Now I've just stopped struggling, but I'm still an addict. Heck, someone's even chosen my disability (it's disabling for sure) as a 'mockery' of some pharmaceutical companies who 'play up' or possibly 'create' new diagnoses just so they can sell a new drug.

The only hope I have seemingly is that I just recently watched a lecture about ADHD, which I never thought I had, and re-learned about the dopaminergic reward pathways in the brain. Importantly though, apparently adults who suffer from ADHD show more of a deficit in their dopamine in the motivation/reward pathway of this part of the brain, than they do the attention part of it. Also a really neat thing is that most aspie traits that I seem to have, ones that involve executive function, is part of this same pathway. They're all connected. But instead of having horrible executive function, or being hyperactive, or being really bad at being attentive, all disabilities which have names, which have treatments, which have people studying them, I have the one that seemingly only recreational drug-users get; lack of motivation.
Note while I have and occasionally drink too much, I don't use recreational drugs or smoke anything, so I haven't burnt myself out.

Caffeine can almost be like a miracle drug in that regard, but since my celiac dx and going gluten free, I'm even less tolerant to it than I once was, and there's nasty withdrawal where I get extra tired and grumpy. And chocolate and coffee I just don't feel well when I eat them now too (much like I can't eat sulphites without getting a rash now, even though before being gluten-free I was fine), plus it's ridiculously hard to find stuff that's guaranteed to be gluten-free enough.

I feel like this too, though I've never been seriously depressed.

Your brain needs to heal. It can't do that if you are fighting it all the time to suddenly be 'normal'.

How long do I need to give it healing? I haven't tried working in over 2 years now.