I'm a college student who's feeling real apathetic towards everything right now.
Anything. Literally, anything. My logic is that if nothing feels like what I should do, then anything I can do won't be wrong. The more practical answer is that I read everything. Local newspapers, signs, flyers, whatever has local information, and I resolve to go to the first thing that I can. I end up at cookoffs, concerts, yard sales, grand openings, just stuff. Sometimes I can get people to go with me, but sometimes I go alone. A lot of times nothing happens, but every now and then something catches my eye or I get some inspiration of what I should actually be doing. It's just that if I spend everyday doing the same thing, sitting in my house on the computer, I never get new information to put towards the problem and so the answer to the question "what should I do" never changes. Change the input, change the output.
I want to second this suggestion, and also talk about why I think it works. I'm going to assume that apathy comes from depression, because that's where it comes from for me, and that's the framework that I use to understand and counteract apathy. Apathy comes from a lack of willpower. Willpower is drained by making decisions, and limited by depression. To beat apathy, you must regain willpower. To regain willpower, you must successfully USE willpower. The catch-22 is that you can't do the things which regain willpower when you don't have willpower. But like @Isherwood says, do ANYTHING. ANYTHING you do will have the side-effect of regenerating a bit of willpower once you've gotten yourself to do it. Willpower is a finite resource that each of us needs to be able to do things that we don't "want" to do. When willpower is lowest, it can be very difficult to do anything. When someone is depressed, their willpower is depressed: literally pushed down and prevented from the normal process of regenerating to full. Certain activities can help regenerate willpower, but without enough willpower to perform those activities, we get stuck. Vicious cycle, spiral of depression. How can we break that cycle? Psychiatrists say, "Take these antidepressants; they'll make you feel good enough to start doing things again.". This is one way of breaking the cycle. The chemical burst of artificial willpower is useful, and for some people, it's the best option. But I think it's important to distinguish between what the drug does and how it helps. Taking the drug doesn't "fix" the depression, it puts you in a state of mind where you can more easily do the things you need to do in order to get out of the depressive cycle. The cycle could be broken in other ways. So, in summary, when willpower is low, we get caught in a downwards spiral of apathy and depression. To get out of that, we need to 1. recognize that we're limited by a lack of willpower, and 2. do anything we can do with the willpower that remains, no matter how simple or small the anything is. So go outside and DO THINGS! :)
Classic advice is to clean. Getting something done is the best antidote to apathy.
Most people don't have a burning desire to do a thing. Most people fall into stuff, find something they didn't realise they'd like, then that leads to something they didn't realise they'd like even more... Try basically everything you're not sure you'd dislike for a couple hours a week for a month. If you hate it, NBD, quit. Most people don't like most things. But for the most part, you won't know what you really enjoy until you've already been doing something for a while.
Happened to me. I went into Computer Science because I didn't know what else to do. Then, I wasn't passionate about anything, but I was leaning toward IT. But I got offered an internship as a software developer. Now I'm a software engineer, and I love programming. Just keep doing what you're doing. Graduate, get a job you don't hate, doing something that uses your skills. Wait a couple years, see how you feel. If you start hating it, find something else. Do you hate your major? Then switch. If not, stick it out. At some point you'll either realise you like your job, or at least don't mind it; or that you hate it; or that you know exactly what you really want to be doing. I don't think anyone really has an epiphany and knows instantly what they want to do, or grows up knowing. Life just kind of happens when you're not looking.Most people don't have a burning desire to do a thing. Most people fall into stuff, find something they didn't realise they'd like, then that leads to something they didn't realise they'd like even more...
Tea. Seriously, you make tea, and every time you do it put in some weird element to make your ceremony a bit more elaborate, until it looks like an african monkey-brain eating ritual. Then, every month or so, you scrap everything except for the actual tea-making, and you start over.