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Notes -
I don't think that's quite the same, though: that just seems like normal low-commitment behavior to me (including the "what am I doing with my life?" piece every so often), cycling through hobbies once you've exhausted them. Not that this problem can't look like that, though (and it's a good first pass for normal people).
Most of the people I know (including the one you just described) like this are high-commitment for hobbies, people, etc. and actually try to make things work (scarcity/survive mindset?), so this doesn't fit. When I stop being able to consider working on something, or hanging out with people, it's not caused by that- it's something very different than "too hard, bored now", and to a point what I believe the 'depression' mechanism is supposed to protect us from (the "stop giving it your best, don't even look at that, save your energy for other opportunities"). It is probably functioning normally in this instance, but what's prompting it to occur is not.
[That first pass applied thoughtlessly is usually net-negative for us; from our standpoint, we're being clear and honest about how we work and that first pass signals you just aren't paying attention. I can see going to therapy/counseling being like this, which means it can be of limited effectiveness if you're running through the "troubleshoot a normal human being" checklist.]
We over-consider it, because we're running the "functional/aligned-in-the-AI-sense human being" program in high-level emulation rather than letting the hardware model other people for us (the normal way). It takes a lot more energy to do this.
After that, it's down to personality. Some of us are real assholes about that and make that everyone else's problem by complaining about absurd nonsense; others keep it to ourselves.
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