Why do I lose interest in everything?
You lose interest in everything because staying interested requires a kind of exposure you have stopped being willing to risk, not because the things stopped being worth wanting. Interest is not a mood, it is a bet that something will still matter to you by the time you finish it. When that bet has failed enough times, quietly or loudly, the mind starts pulling out before the payoff, and it calls the pulling out boredom.
What is actually happening
Interest is forward-leaning. It requires you to picture a future version of the thing going well and to care about that picture in advance. When you notice you cannot hold that picture anymore, whether it is a hobby you dropped in week two or a relationship you watched yourself go flat inside, that is usually the anticipation circuitry declining to fire, not the object losing value. You will often notice the drop happens right around the point where the thing was starting to require something from you, a decision, a commitment, a public attempt. The interest does not fade evenly across the whole activity. It fades sharply at the threshold where it would have started costing you something to keep going.
Why this makes sense
If you have had periods where wanting something badly and either not getting it or getting it and having it not fix anything, the system that generates want has good reason to throttle itself. Chronic disappointment is not just sad, it is expensive, and a mind that has paid that cost repeatedly will start rationing enthusiasm the way a burned hand stays away from the stove without consulting you first. This is also common after a period of high-stakes effort, a big project, a caregiving stretch, a relationship that took everything you had, where the nervous system spent its entire budget on one target and has not rebuilt the reserve to spend on anything else yet. Losing interest in everything is frequently the after-cost of having cared enormously about one thing very recently. It is not evidence that you are broken or that nothing is good anymore. It is evidence that wanting has gotten expensive for you specifically, and the mind is doing what minds do with expensive things, which is avoid them.
What actually helps
Trying to manufacture interest by forcing yourself into more novelty, a new hobby, a new city, a new hard reset, usually backfires, because it asks the depleted system to do the exact thing it is protecting itself from doing. What tends to work better is picking one very small, low-stakes thing and deliberately not deciding yet whether you like it. Do it twice before you let yourself rule on whether it is boring. This matters because the collapse-of-interest reflex fires early, often within the first few minutes of contact, and if you delay the verdict you give the slower, more accurate system time to weigh in. It also helps to separate the question 'do I want this' from the question 'am I safe wanting this,' because for a lot of people who lose interest in everything, the second question is the one actually running the show, and it deserves to be answered directly instead of disguised as a preference.
When to take it seriously as more than a pattern
If the flatness covers every domain at once, including things tied to basic functioning, sleep, appetite, hygiene, and has lasted more than two weeks with no variation by day or context, that profile looks more like a depressive episode than a protective pattern and is worth naming to a doctor as exactly that. The distinguishing detail is texture. A protective loss of interest usually still has good hours, a flicker of pull toward something, a moment where you catch yourself almost caring. A depressive one tends to be flatter across the board, with less of that flicker, and it responds less to the small-step approach because the problem is not threshold avoidance, it is a broader shutdown that usually needs more direct treatment.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Ghost rhythm, the thing under the behavior.