LOST. how to get out? motivation & mental disciplines?

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tl;dr: What are the building blocks for finding yourself and no longer being lost?

I'm lost. I have no sense of control, motivation, sense of self, sense of the world. I don't know the way "out" of being lost.
The past month (since I moved out of a place with a crazy roommate into my own apartment) I've been very lost. I've been staying up late, sleeping all day. Sometimes not leaving the apartment all day. Avoiding people. And the other day I felt like I was a teenager again, panic and anger swelling and obliterating all thought. I hadn't felt that way in at least 10-15 years.
I occasionally feel motivated to improve my life, but obviously these feelings are outweighed by other feelings. Good ideas about self-improvement are useless in the face of having no idea how to even convince myself to stick with it. I feel so immature, to the point of being nothing more than a glorified animal. Wow, self-awareness. How often do I use that?

Here are some theories I have about addressing this problem for anyone who feels lost. (blind leading the blind? I have a feeling I'll get advice from similarly vision-impaired people )
My two theories are on motivation, and mental disciplines.

I think there are some basics that begin even before you follow traditional advice of getting a job, hobby, and social life.
Everyone always says that none of it will happen unless you WANT to. What if you don't want to? Are you doomed to wait for unlikely events outside of your control to change your mind for you? If you're not motivated, and have little or no self-control, what can you do to change that? What could you ask someone else to do to change that for you?
I believe that people are born under different circumstances that are not equal. We're not all born with perfect control over our lives. You can blame the corrupt government in your war-torn country for your poverty, or your parents for mentally crippling you so that you're little more than a family pet, but we all know blame won't solve our problems, even if understanding the source helps.
Sometimes I feel like a leech, looking for someone to solve my problems for me, but while I may have selfish and unhealthy feelings about it, I think positive role-models might even be a requirement. I don't know how anyone can possibly come up with sane ideas living in a world full of nothing but crazy people.

I think the next step might be mental disciplines. Discipline defined both as far as control, and as well as different methods. You inspire to motivate, and then you teach. I heard a lecture* recently about how someone thought that creativity was the interaction of different mental disciplines. I have no mental disciplines. I'm reactive rather than proactive. There's no shifting from one frame of mind into another, I just wait for something to change me so that I can deal with it. Not very efficient.
*: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_ ... ivity.html
What I'm curious about is what are these disciplines, and how do you learn them? It's nice to say "oh, you should learn different disciplines." but that's meaningless if you don't know the difference between learning a discipline and not learning one.
Most of this ambiguous advice stems around bumbling around life blind discovering things for yourself. Well, we can't tell you how to live your life, only you can answer that question. Great, and why are we a social species, not only capable but NEEDING to teach each other things if that's the case? I know that's kind of obvious, but it seems to be something that needs to be said because people just end their advice there.

Hey I feel the same as you, I've lost my motivation for life.

For me what I need to do is write a plan on what I need to do and follow it.

Break the plan into smaller steps and concerntrate on each step one at a time. So you know what you are doing. I don't really care if I suceed or fail in my plan, life is a journey not about acheiving goals. All you end up acheiving in life is death anyway. lol

I figured out that I enjoy fighting and challenging myself.

having something a goal to work towards helps.

push yourself and encourage yourself.

try to think positively about things....bla bla

I need to follow my own advice. thanx MR_BOGAN

first of all , forget the second part of your post and recognise and accept that you sound and are deomonstrating depression...the second part is you doing the As thing to get out of anything, you try and rationalise and perseverate your way out of it.
your in a hole dude...i been in it too.
first step out?
recognise it.

Not me. I find it grueling. It's like dealing with a disobedient child, and I can't handle that! I don't know. I think it's my dissociation*. I've been thinking perhaps I should be working with it instead of trying to fight it. Maybe I'm supposed to be dissociatively playing two roles. or at least one.
Maybe I should be reading about how to discipline children instead. :S I hear you need to be consistent with them, and not give in to them. That's pretty hard. and he's a REALLY smart child! He's always got REALLY convincing excuses not to do any of the rules I put in place. and I think I'm just used to giving in, so sometimes he just has to go "I don't wanna! I feel bad!" and that's enough of a reason to let him stay up late, play video games, eat crap, and not brush his teeth. I'm exaggerating the 3rd person narrative, but I think that's what's going on.
I mean, my mom couldn't outsmart me, how am I s... hrm. well I SHOULD be as smart as me, but then again, I've hear the subconscious mind is VERY powerful.
Hmmm... I have a digital camera with video function... I'm going to play around with it. Maybe I can like... video-blog to myself, which might help me to see entire messages played back like a mirror. I've hardly used the video function at all on it... man. what a lot of work... maybe I can make a movie out of it. I can't imagine scripting something would be as effective, so I should probably get it all, and edit it.

*: dissociating is to multiple personality disorder as aspergers is to autism. It's like a mild form of it that clearly doesn't count as the full blown thing. It varies, and people can easily see similar behavior (for aspergers or dissociation) even in people who don't have it.
Dissociation is like associating a(/an unwanted) part of yourself as separate from yourself.


What's the next step? I want out!

step 2 is : check step 1.

no one has any thoughts on the basics required, and if motivation is the very base requirement to get anything done?

See, goals are meaningless without motivation. I can arbitrarily think up a goal, but I'm not likely to attempt it without the motivation.
I think we're in a culture with a lot of pitfalls that rob us of momentum, and then we're required to "pick ourselves up by our bootstraps", somehow summoning this momentum from nowhere. Perhaps if you're well brought up to have the motivation and self-discipline (I imagine you could be self-disciplined but not well motivated, so that under certain, extreme circumstances you lose your discipline) you could regain your momentum, but that's all dependent on your upbringing. What about those without such luxuries of fate?
The ONLY answer to this question I've ever found seems to be somehow stumbling upon the motivation to force yourself against your own will. Now if I'm stopped from doing that by over-analyzing things, how do I stop from stopping myself? :> It's the same simplistic answer to the question of "how do you do something?" with "you just do it."

all I do is hang on. it's not enough.

I can relate to everything you said regarding motivation. Those words could be my own. I’m at a loss other than to say you must be depressed as I am.

These are symptoms of depression. I've had them most of my life to varying degrees. I'm in a bit of an 'up' period right now so I'm not taking my own advice for myself, but I recommend that you get help for depression. If you don't let someone help you, and try to solve things yourself with lots of analysis and rationalizing, you can spend a lot of years, even decades, lost. I have done this. (I'm 37.)

Chaotic descent, do you have dreams? Tell us about one of your dreams.

I love the taste of it. Maybe I'm different to you then.

You need to find things that are meaningful to you, then maybe that will give you motivation.

I've been listening to songs on you tube that awaken my sensors to me they are meaningful.

:S It's funny, because Buddhism is all about being receptive and learning about yourself... I mean, that's... not necessarily analysis. You can attempt analysis without actually being receptive. I think that's the real problem. Not the fact that I'm trying to figure things out on my own.
One of the problems with letting people help you is that it's a difficult balancing act. My mom tends to do stuff for me when she does help, which doesn't help me become independent. I find myself desperately searching for people to do everything for me. Find information for me, receive packages for me in the mail and inspect them, prepare my food, do my laundry, solve all my problems, FIX ME.
oh well... I guess it's all just... balance, which I've always had a problem with. Going to extremes.

I wrote down a few goals a while ago... they haven't really helped though... I haven't done anything about them... probably because most of the time I don't really care about them. especially the more realistic ones.
I need a driver's license. I need a job. (which might require a high school diploma) I need to take the GED to get a job. none of these things really interests me, but it's the results that I need. :S
I want to make real life replicas of 3D models of characters and weapons from games. I also want a MMO sandbox, where people can interact with material from different games. I want something that improves people's lives through games... either something that treats your real life like a video game, or something less video-game-y and more like the movie "The Game" with Michael Douglas.
I want to learn music composition, story-telling, about aesthetics, about ecosystems like soil (I think soil might be made by fungi breaking down minerals).

I want to open a museum for Transformers. (the #1 selling boy's toy in North America, in case you've never heard of it. humanoid robots that transform into various things like vehicles. they've been around for almost 25 years straight.)
I've broken it down into 3 main groups of things I have to do, but it still seems like the end is far away, because I'm having trouble breaking down my goals into manageable, individual steps...
Hrm... I wrote it all out but now that I'm thinking about them, I'm realizing the solutions to them all. sort of. I think. I wanted to know the 2ndary purpose of the museum; whether it should be for me, or for kids; in a quiet place, or in a big city. It's gotta be in a big city. I wanted to know the costs to determine the scale of the museum, but the scale is set, and the costs will be what they'll be. The third thing was funding, which I had thought should be supplied by a NPO business, but if money were that easy to make, everyone would do it. Then again, if I want something as simple as money, I'll find a way.

I don't know what's meaningful to me...
guh... I look at self-improvement stuff... there's so many options. it's too much. I wish I had more limited options. I recently started getting interested in uh... I dunno what you call it. supernatural stuff. but I don't know how much of it is just a waste of time. I'm a skeptic. In some ways that neutralizes the effect of some of these things. but I think there are legitimate uses for these things. They're not just entertaining fantasies, they're tools. even a skeptic could benefit from their use in certain ways. but I'm not sure how to discern the fluff from the practical, since I'm guessing the majority of this stuff is targeted at gullible people. I could waste a lot of time reading glorified fantasy novels passed off as real life.

... my mind is just blank... there's no sense to my world. people say "what about this?" and I go "what about it?" It's one thing. one thing by itself. and you can give me a second thing, but how do the two relate? Where is the whole thing? Why is all I can find when I'm looking for a life is an isolated fragment of life, which itself is not life?
a few people told me I need something to do, like a job. is that going to solve my problems? is it going to get me somewhere that's not going to immediately just sink back to the same situation I'm in now? you know, assuming it could just spontaneously happen somehow to begin with.

I bet there are no guides for us lost people... all the old-world guides were meant to guild old-world people, and we're just too messed up. there's no simple answers to our problems. bah. I don't like being in an age where we're still pioneers in this field.

What I know is that motivation follows action. You won't become motivated to start doing something until you actually begin to do it. Starting is really hard, but it can help if you schedule a time to do it, and start with simple things. (Like, I had zero motivation to clean my sink that had gotten all moldy...but once I started, it actually was kind of cool how it got cleaner, like magic! That's just a silly example, but you know what I mean?)