Self-Starting ..... not

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I seem to be incapable of thinking of something to do and then doing it. If I have free time, I will always resort to stimming (which in my case is anything having to do with words - usually ends up being online). Even if I want to make myself do something new, I can't think of anything. Now I have a partner but for years I was single - I spent years doing nothing.
Part of the problem is, I don't know what would be fun. Fun is mostly foreign to me until I find myself experiencing it. I cannot come up with a plan of action unless there is something or someone preceding that prompts me into action.
I have the same problem with things like going out to eat, picking movies, etc.

Most of the time I just don't know what I want and can't figure it out without some sort of trigger or prompt.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Sometimes. In general I'm just plain indecisive (I have the "I don't really care" attitude). What are your interests & your partners interests? Since your on the net & posting try looking up activities & finding local places near you that offer things to do with your interests. (I don't know go to a museum if you like history/mummies, etc. or go out to eat at a chinese restaurant if you &/or your partner like chinese food, go to a Star Trek, anime convention, library or bookstore if you like "geeky stuff", I don't know ). Start with determining what you like.

The cool thing about being an adult is you can range far and wide doing strange things.

I like driving. I like being in my car, cruising down the highway. Sometimes I decide I am hungry, and I want something to eat. It doesn't matter most of the time what I eat, but where. I'll drive 50 miles round trip for lunch to get a fast food burger from a chain restaurant even though there is one just down the street.

The thing to remember about doing things is it isn't so much what you do, but that you do it! And doing is even better for me when it is unplanned, or has a slightly whimsical twist to it, like driving to the nearest gaming town and putting $20 into a slot machine and eating at the casino buffet on a weeknight.

The grim thing about being an adult is that there are always things you have to do.

My life, with encroaching old age, has devolved into a sort of clockwork repetition of the things I have to do. From the alarm clock in the morning to the blood sugar tests and insulin in the evenings, any irregularity threatens disaster.

I can easily fall into inactivity if I can't see any challenges that happen to appeal to me. I often end up doing stuff that has the potential to increase my capabilities but isn't realistically the best use of my time.....for example I just borrowed a computer utility program to make a change to the operating system (NTFS to FAT32 to be exact) so that I can keep using an old program that wouldn't otherwise work. There's no particular reason why I should bother, as I've got another similar program that works fine without making the change. I've made the change but for some reason that's not enough for me.....I have to make copies of the program and test them to make absolutely sure that I can always do it again in the future, although there's no evidence that I'll ever need to. I'll also no doubt be writing copious notes and step-by-step instructions to archive away for that rainy day that probably won't even happen. I'll probably spend most of the weekend chewing over the various ramifications of what will happen if I do it this way, how can I test it to make sure it's all perfect before the disc has to be returned, etc. It's actually quite a complicated thing but I'll spare you the details.

Anybody normal would just let it go, and get on with using the computer for something that might deliver a more immediate reward, but I have to really force myself to do that. Possibly it's my fascination for technical problem-solving, and maybe also my appallingly poor organisational skills and inability to keep the big picture in mind....yet I'm usually very mindful of the mistake I'm making. Perfectionism is also involved - I end up with a better result than anybody else could be bothered to achiieve, and I think that's what drives me to do the work, but the practical value of the improvement is mainly theoretical.

As for the mundane stuff that has to be done, I do the bare minimum with an air of contempt in my heart. It bores me silly to do anything - even if it's essential - that doesn't feel profound and "high-powered" in some way.

I have problems doing things "just for fun." I guess the drive to slake my thirst for snazzy achievements is as near as it gets most of the time....and it definitely is a kind of fun to discover a way of doing a thing I've never been able to do before, and to carefully store away the knowledge so that I'll always have that newly-acquired power. But just taking pleasure in the simple things of life, that can completely escape me for weeks. Even stuff like going for a walk and enjoying the scenery, I'm often too preoccupied to notice much, and tend to feel I'm doing wrong because I have important work to attend to (business before pleasure), though thankfully I do surface now and then, and I can be quite awestruck at the unexpected sight of a rare animal or plant.

It's definitely got worse as I've got older. Maybe it's a symptom of depression, when you can't readily enjoy simple things? Sometimes I think I'll be more able to loosen up again when I've found out how my working life is going to pan out (it's at a watershed right now). For me, the world of working for wages seems to hang over me like a funeral shroud, and makes me an insecure person even when I'm not at work. The job problems will have to be sorted out soon (one way or the other), and I just hope that the resilient person I used to be will still be alive inside me somewhere.......it'd be awful to discover that I'd become so habitually scared and negative that there was no longer any hope for me even in an environment where all the major sources of stress had been removed.

Still, I can sometimes watch a film or other piece of drama, and enjoy it a lot. It's very hit-and-miss......most television and radio bores me. But there are enough successes to keep me looking.