How to keep special interest?

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I can feel one of my special interests fading but I really don’t want it to fade so how do I stop it from going away?

Over the decades I've found that some of my interests have faded...or I've just been too busy to spend as much time as I would like on them. I keep the associated paraphernalia and hope to get back to them when I have time.

Except, I have no compelling desire to revisit how the different VW bug model years can be distinguished with a quick look. When I was young I could look at a bug and tell you the model year. I'm OK to have lost that interest.

I just try to develop them into the next phase.

I turned my geography into an obsession into the geography of sports leagues, which turned into my interest in hockey. Which turned into an interest of where hockey players are from, where teams win and lose, where teams play during the regular season etc.

When I'm with NTS I can carry a conversation about a common interest(at least in Canada) but at the same time that common interest in underpinned by my interest in geography.

I'm a strong believer you should attempt to mature your interests not give up on them entirely, it's a pathway for a more fulfilling life.

Keeping in mind the reason hockey came into the picture, was directly because my epilepsy-marriage-income made it so it was difficult for me to travel across the world. Instead I focused on local geography with the most interesting aspect of that geography being where players came from. It means I can go just about anywhere and strike up a conversation with someone in the room. It means I can go by any nearby town and look up arenas famous hockey players played in.

Obviously I could extend my interests in any direction and so can you if you get creative.

That being said it's important to appreciate what an autistic obsession is.

It seems to be the case that obsessions are based around goals. When I say goal I don't mean something you'd like to do, or something an ambitious person wishes to do.

Goals from a neurological perspective revolve around drives, and by drives I mean something like a sex drive. Your brain wants to align itself to drive you towards a specific goal. Your nervous system literally drives you forward, when you have something you desire. The more you satisfy that drive the more you'll be happy and succeed.

Everyone focuses on a goal they wish to achieve. In the case of NTs goals can be much more literal, I.e. making more money, getting a pickup truck, getting married etc.

When you have trouble moving forward in your real life, your goals move towards abstractions/escapism etc.

Neurologically speaking your brain doesn't really distinguish from wanting to be an engineer and wanting a nice stamp collection. When you fixate you imagine pathways, you think about how you want to get there and you'll get dopamine kicks every time you take an inch forward.

My obsessive made me wish I could travel the world, but for the reasons I listed above I can't, or even if I could I'd quickly go broke. This lead to a lot of depression, and a general feeling that nothing in life was worth chasing after.

In contrast my hockey interest helps me achieve goals I should want' but are things I'm not necessarily all that interested in.

My goals relating to hockey are transformed into goals that would be recommended by my therapist.

I want to watch hockey with people, watching with people is more fun, so I now have a roadmap for making friends. Find hockey fans-talk about hockey-invite them over.

I need to get a job, so what is my goal when I get stuck in a sh***y job I don't like? My planning involves saving up money so I can afford to goto a few games. I'm not worried about having a career, I'm my focus is on 6 weeks from now, I need $26 for a game, which means my entire focus is on getting that first pay check.

My wife complains my space is too messy and dirty. What's my motivation for doing a task I hate? Setting up the ideal man cave for watching hockey. Now my pregame ritual is ensuring my room is set up for the ultimate game day experience.

This whole thing developed over the period of covid, hockey is in part a brand new hobby, but it is also a very natural extension of my previous obsession with geography. It's become something that makes me embrace my sh***y life, instead of my previous obsession which just left me wanting to escape my life.

Obviously you have to figure out these things for yourself, but just appreciate what healthy goals are and how they extend from obsessions.

In my experience not having an obsession translates into having no focus, no purpose, laziness etc.

I suppose I've lost interest in the special interests of mine that have stopped developing - no more readily-accessible avenues to explore, or no more research occurs to me that looks as if it could advance my understanding. Or an interest might get so easy that it's no longer any challenge. Or circumstances such as external pressure or just my wisely noticing that I've got more interesting things to do, might take me away from an interest for so long that it becomes rather "out of sight, out of mind."

I think low spirits can make me reluctant to get involved with a current special interest, I can start to feel daunted and negative, and I start to feel that whatever I'm about to try won't work. It was like that with music for a little while in December last year. I'd been in a poor mood for some time, and had to quite push myself into starting a new music project. But when I did finally make a start, after a day or two I started to feel a lot better. Maybe I was just lucky. My project was pretty ambitious and the materials that were at my disposal might have let me down, and I really don't think this is a good time for me to start spending serious money on it. But they didn't let me down. I get a lot out of trying to do something difficult, and doing it well. So now I'm eager to do more, and I'm feeling a lot better than I was.

I think also it's possible to notice that obsession has its downside, and to start feeling some contempt for being its slave. Sometimes I'm about to go down a rabbit hole but I notice and then I don't want to unless I have some idea of when I'll come out again - I have to see light at the end of the tunnel before I put my head in there.

And it might just be fatigue and having had too much of a "good thing." When I first built some multi-tracking recording gear in the 1970s, there was no stopping me at first, and I set about recording song after song, until after a few weeks I reached a point where I was feeling increasingly like quitting the whole thing. It was very hard work and I guess I was just getting sick of it. I'd reached a ceiling in the results I could achieve.

Of course I'm very lucky that I chose music because there's always something else I can do with it. If studio recording starts to get tedious, there's live performances, jamming with fellow-musicians, looking for new music by others that hits the spot, trying out a new instrument, writing a new song. It can be as social or as asocial as I want it to be, because lots of other people play and record music, and I can join forces with them or I can go it alone. Probably not the most restrictive or stereotyped interest in the world. I think sometimes it's the restrictive nature of an interest that makes me feel like dropping it.