Help! Do your strongest interests fade over time?

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Trencher93
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02 Jun 2011, 6:38 am

Depends on whether the interest is exhaustible or not. Some interests are open-ended and never can be exhausted, and some have a finite limit of some sort where you've exhausted everything that can be done.

At some point, I start seeing the same stuff over and over, maybe just worded differently, and I know I have reached an exhaustion point. AS itself was like that: For a few years, I kept researching new material, but now the things I see tend to not be new.



ocdgirl123
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02 Jun 2011, 9:25 am

My strongest interest, was very short. We were doing a unit in school on planets, so my special interest became planets. It was about February or March. That interest ended the next December (and it started to fade before).



ToughDiamond
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02 Jun 2011, 10:15 am

Yes I've lost interest in a lot of things. Perhaps unusual for an Aspie, I became mindful that I could be wasting time, so after that I tended to always ask the question "does this produce a useful result?" and to make my special interests functional. So as soon as digital recording on computers was affordable, I stopped push-processing my 4-track analogue recording hardware and started using a PC. When it became clear that multi-tracking on my own was keeping me away from people, I stopped recording and took up performing live. The assault to my perfectionism was horrible (you get nothing like the same degree of control over live sound as you do over studio recordings), but I'm still scared to go back to the studio because if I do, I'll probably not come out again for weeks. So I'm still doing music but I don't stick to the same narrow parts of it that I used to.

Similarly I've given up:

Videotaping TV programmes (the collection got too big).

Making electronic audio devices (it's nearly always cheaper to buy them ready-made)

Photography (it's no longer economical or convenient to use film, but affordable digital cameras have a delay between hitting the button and taking the picture, which ruins everything, and they seem complicated to use)

Anything that starts getting nerdy (because I know how that always ends up - lonely)

Strangely enough, Dad was probably autistic, and he gave up his lifelong hobby of pigeon keeping the moment it became impractical to continue.......we couldn't understand how he could be so philosophical about it.



zippy-tri
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02 Jun 2011, 3:36 pm

my interests usually last 3-6 months, and tend to fade when a new one arrives.
I have a few that always come around again, and some havn't.
One year I could be almost expert in a particular topic, then the next year forget a lot of that information. That happens a lot.