sticking with a hobby/interest to make it lifelong

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so i am a bit of a jackass of all trades, master of none

i get obsessed with something for a month or even a year and then switch to something else, and in between there are dangerous times when i feel all my interests are crap and i just kind of lie there

how do you stick with something? what do you stick with? do you do the same thing? are we all doomed to serial shallow obsessions? i dont know, seems like people get a lot out of things they stick with for years, i am very jealous of that

heres a partial list of things i flit to:

plants, particularly cacti and orchids
insects, particularly beetles and ants... and bees
physics and math, particularly nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and group theory
languages, German, Icelandic, Swedish, Japanese, Nahuatl, sadly the list goes on and on
computers, linux, privacy, Haskell, Rust
activism and... counterculture? punk rock, socialism, zines, culture jamming
drawing, realistic insects to weird scifi baloney

astonomy, radio dxing, looking for land to buy to build an underground complex or reforest and or keep bees on, i dont know if computer games cound but i have spent a lot of time playing minecraft, terraria, starbound, pokemon, harvest moon, overwatch, fallout 4

i could go on but it's getting depressing. i strongly believe we are on this planet just to fart around, as Vonnegut puts it, but it would be nice to find something

let me know your list so we can commiserate or let me know that one thing, that one super thing youve found, maybe how you stick to it, even if it involves chanting or sticky notes on the mirror

--rob

ps i am giving up punctuation and using fewer capital letters in an attempt at egalitarianism and to be more like ee cummings

I feel as though I am similar, my flitting list seems to be smaller though. They're all things I enjoy doing and/or reading about, but at any one time all but a few lay dormant. I certainly empathise with you on this feeling.

Do you consider them shallow obsessions because of how short-lived and numerous they tend to be?

I think the desire to channel my attention into a single direction is appealing but I would be missing out on a lot if I did that. But what would it matter if I didn't care about that which I was missing out on? On the other hand if our curiosity/interest splits and fans out like roots, couldn't that make life feel more rich? I think some would say it's enviable to be able to juggle many interests.

By now, even if it doesn't feel like it, you must have accumulated a lot of knowledge of the areas you listed. With that in mind couldn't it be easier to find the areas where your interests meet? Where they intertwine? Kind of like a family tree. What if through that method you found something that was the bees knees?

Speaking from my perspective of this issue.. I'm not sure there is a way to stick with something without it being forced and therefore becoming boring or even upsetting to continue to pursue. I think most of us probably burnout at some point in such cases. Something that's helping me accept this is a statement I found in a book: "Accept it when you have narrow interests, or broad ones." I used to struggle a lot with desperately wanting to find my "passion", nothing else was cutting it, life felt unfulfilling without it. It probably felt that way because of my striving and desire though. I can't say I've found that but I've found a lot of things that fascinate me and are fulfilling to pursue and bask in.. I'm not sure what the difference is. Maybe the difference between people who shoot forward in one direction and people who spread out is how they react to feeling fascination.

Interestingly, when I was younger than say 12, I had this fascination with mental arithmetic. I would take great joy in calculating sums in my head as opposed to using "working out" on paper. The faster I began solving them in my head the greater the joy. I would also love memorising phone numbers. As a result I'd gotten almost the highest result possible in the final maths exams of school. Anyway after joining secondary school life took a nose-dive and I gradually forgot that joy and fascination, despite it once being such a potent thing in my life. Now I have all these seemingly unrelated (to maths) interests, some of which are really fulfilling to dig into, when they do return to me to be obsessed over. It's strange: in a way I feel like I've went from one extreme to the other. I do often wonder though, what if I took up that mathematics thing again, I know I'd enjoy it, but where would I take it? Could I take it anywhere? Some things I've heard about mathematics interest me, but I don't know how to find my way into the mathematics beyond the level of secondary school.

I do feel it's important for fulfillment to follow one's curiosity, broad or narrow, even though it salted the snail.

Hi Handa Rei,

thank you for the well thought out message.

i definitely have convinced myself that having broad interests is advantageous. it would make me a lot of fun at cocktail parties im not invited to.

i have acquired expertise in each but not to the degree other can that devote their life to the topic and seem to eat and breathe it. When im into something i feel like i have finally found my thing, my passion, as you say, but then, a year later i wonder what i was thinking, its certainly this other thing that i truly love. rinse and repeat

have you heard of these memory competitions? i read about them in a book moonwalking with einstein that i thought was quite good. maybe that would be fun for you. i also like to memorize numbers and also factor numbers and find prime numbers. you may enjoy number theory, maybe integer solutions to diophantine equations. i love integers

but yeah, i think we are poisoned by the whole "follow your passion" thing and then we are like "ahh! i have no passion!"

I forget who, maybe warren buffet said write down all the things you are interested in and rank them, then throw out all but the top five, those you should concentrate on.

I like watching insects, spiders and other bugs and learning about them, but its winter now...so not a lot of bugs to watch. If I see a cool one that I don't know what is I usually try and find it on the internet so I can find out about it. Like one time I saw a really scary looking wasp it was very large and appeared to have a long stinger. Turns out its a totally harmless(too humans) horntail wasp and that wasn't a stinger, turns out they lay their eggs in trees with that spike so its not for stinging.

But that's really only an interest when bugs are actually out, can't really maintain much interest in the winter when most of them are dead or essentially asleep. That is just one example but I have certainly had interests I delve into but can't really just stick to it. Like for a while I thought I'd get myself a bass guitar and an amp and learn to play bass because I liked music so much, why not play it. I did get a bass guitar and an amp, but it was much harder than I thought and I wasn't really motivated to get all that into it....so that certainly phased out, turns out I prefer to listen to music rather than trying to play it. I mean I was in band class for all middle school and highschool in percussion and maybe I could have gotten something out of it but other classmates weren't very encouraging and I never was very good. But honestly it feels better to not be attempting to play music and just enjoy it by listening to other people with way better skill play it. But I couldn't shake being interested in the idea, but I think finally with the whole bass guitar thing I just realized I wasn't a musician and maybe I didn't even want to be regardless of my interest in the subject.

For me it has been model railways and railways. The model railways side of things is more of my speciality. And being in the hobby for a great many years means that I have learnt whT I like and don't like, so I have specialized more... Where in the past my interests were more genedal. It is not that I don't have a like for all things in model railway and railway forms. It is more that I am more selective these days as I have matured in the hobby. I have become more of a traditionalist, where in the past I was into everything.

I have another hobby that I have had since a relatively early age. Bicycles, cycles etc. I am fortunate in that especially on the bicycle side, but also on the railway side of things, all but one job I have had involved either one hobby or the other. To call them special interests for me is far more accurate and some may feel is an understatement. Hwever, though I go deep, some tallented people I know make me look like I am scratching the surface! Though to be honsst, thw aspects of either subject I don't know so much about, I don't really aant to know so much about. For example, I may know a lot about pedal cycles, but don't ask me to name famous cyclists, as I see them as ordinary people, some of whom I may have competed with if they were into mountain bike racing in the past. Oh gosh. Since those days everything has become soo commercial, I lost interest in some of the newer expensive bicycles, as they have strayed into the "How can we abstract rhe most money from our customers" type of idealism which I am dead against. Fair play if a more expensive bicycle is worth paying out the extra money, but to be perfectly honest, these days after test riding many different types and price brackets of bicycle after repairing them, I have to say that many if the higher priced bicycles cost more to maintain, have more problems and their performance is not neccessarily worth the extra outlay. In the past when I first started in the trade, most if the trade was the more you spend the better bicycle you had in every way. These days I just don't see that. There are exceptions to this, but in general, these days I have found more robust and reliable and more suitable bicycles which still maintain a good performance in a moderately lower price bracket if one knows where to look and how to set them up to get the best from them.
When it comes to the pedal cycle, I am not quite a traditionalist, but I am not one who is easily taken in by the many fasions, most of which have come in, died a death only to be reserected as if they are an entirely new design, which most are not... And they are finding they are not much better and suffer the same issues that they did when they tried out the idea all those many years ago. I get a bit frustrated when I see this happening as it is the customers who get the wool pulled over their eyes.
I am not against progress, but let it be proper progress which makes products easier to use, easier to maintain and perform better. Not a re-inventing of an old idea which was not ideally successful the first time around, and now it is the second time around of prehaps the third or fourth, they still come and go like fasions. For me I feel they should stick to what works and has worked well for many years and improve on them.

I have a history of being deeply interested in something and then losing interest in it later on. About the only thing I have been consistent with is a role playing video game. And posting to WP. I guess what is really consistent is being on the internet which I use as an outlet for whatever I have an interest in. I do not want an interest or hobby which involves buying a bunch of material items. I do not want to have that clutter and expense and then be stuck with all that stuff if/when I lose interest in it.