Sure, we should still be researching that too, but people have been trying that, and not with all that much success. What works and doesn't work tends to vary wildly from person to person, and at best people tend to find answers that let them scrape by, not answers that really fix the problem.

And I think it's quite possible that there isn't an organizational solution. It seems very likely to me that humans have evolved to basically be as lazy as we can get away with.

It makes sense as a survival strategy to put in exactly as much effort as it takes to get your basic needs met. For most of us throughout history, this meant working our asses off to subsist. Pushing ourselves further than that would be a dangerous gamble on our resources.

So in first world countries today, many people have this problem where we can subsist on relatively little effort, compared to, say, a farmer in 8000 BC. So our motivation scales down to that context. Send someone with that little motivation back to 8000 BC and ask them to start farming, and they'd starve - except that their motivation would probably rescale to fit the new context.

And yes, there are those who find motivation easy, who don't have these problems. But I think they are significant outliers.

So my point is that I'm not sure we can really ramp up our motivation without finding ways to stress ourselves the hell out. And I don't mean "this report is due tomorrow" stress, but "winter is in one month, and I don't want to die" stress.

I'd really rather have the pill that turns me into an outlier.

Motivation is such a complex issue but it's quite apparent that you can't view it in isolation. I don't see how a hypothetical motivation pill will do much better than an anti-depressant drug.

What I find interesting though is this stigma around depression, lack of motivation and laziness. There's nothing unbecoming, wrong or unnatural about any of these states. We don't need to stamp it out completely.

Winston Churchill had severe depression but he was arguably one of the most productive people in the 20th century. Lazy people often come up with brilliant inventions (in order to do less work). And lack of motivation can often be addressed by life style changes.

Maybe for one person the lack of motivation is because the work they engage in isn't meaningful to them. For another person, the work may be meaningful but they are missing connection from other people. The next person might not be leading a healthy lifestyle so they are not providing their body an environment in which they can thrive (not enough nutrients/sun light etc). And yet another person may simply be experiencing a natural oscillation between being motivated and unmotivated. All of these things can be addressed in some way or another.

Personally, I found the education system a factor in robbing me of motivation and questioning my drive. I didn't get really motivated about learning until I got out of it and picked topics I was truly curious about. But up until that point I would almost have considered myself as kind of broken because I was doing the bare minimum to pass tests when I could be doing so much more. The only thing that changed for me to tap into my drive was the conditions I set. Now I learn because I'm driven by curiosity and a drive to make things.

It would be a pity if people start taking pills without addressing these other things (at least in conjunction).

Having said that, for specific treatment alternatives, I think the future is much brighter with neuro/bio feedback technologies. And it's getting cheaper by the year.

I don't think that there's any reason that it has to be one or the other.

It's interesting that you bring up Winston Churchill. He slept less than 6 hours per day, which suggests to me that he likely had a higher dopamine response than normal. That's associated with higher drive, which means Churchill was probably one of the outliers I was talking about.

The brain, more than any other part of the body, exists within a complex web of feedback systems that can't be separated into a simple cause and effect So if the problem is environment->thought->neurochemistry->action->environment (picture this as a cyclic directed graph), it might not matter which element of the loop is altered as long as something is done at some point on the cycle.