How to find the topic of your interest to be happy!

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I am around 20 years old at the moment, still haven't found something where I can apply with all my energy and time.

I spent most of the years that have passed reading history books (only with sources, I like to have reliable information whenever I read, I usually use wikipedia in english.) and specifically regarding the Third Reich (Nazi history) I do have a passion in that period of time. (but I could not transform it into a job)

I still haven't found a topic where I can apply and start (maybe) to earn money with it. (I would like first and foremost, to be happy with my specific interest)

I have ASD and I am followed by a psychologist and psychiatrist, I spend most of my days playing videogames and reading (I have days where I read up to 5 hours, days where I don't feel like reading but I would like to be more constant in that) at the moment I live with my parents and I work from home for a company abroad which allows me to have a (very) small salary to at least buy books and stuff I can enjoy!

Of course, this kind of life can't go on forever, I have to find a stable job and move out sooner or later because my parents will not allow me to live forever with them (they seems to not accept the diagnosis of ASD)

to return to the main topic, how did you find your specific interest (if you do have one) and when? (did it happen since when you were 5, or when you were already 30?) I would like to hear your personal stories, whether of success or of failure because I want to find a stable job sooner or later and wanted to see if you managed to mix your personal interests with your own job.

I am interested in hearing your stories for this reason.

I tried going to the university of history but due to my restrictive form of interests I was interested in studying only contemporary history (1900/2020) so I could not focus on ancient history, greek history, roman history and so on. I failed my exams and had to drop out sadly, but now I am looking for something else where to apply my focus. (maybe by hearing your personal stories this could help me)

sorry for my english, it is not my main language and for any typos.

BlossX

I’ve been working as a data entry clerk for over 40 years.

I work 35 hours a week. I can indulge in my special interests the rest of the time.

Maybe try to work for your government—whether of your whole country, your province, your city, etc

You are damn right! I am in a ranking for working for my government, i’m waiting the call.
Only thing i am afraid of, is driving to and from work.

Could you take a bus to work?

No, not all the cities in my country are served by bus or train

I have never had anything close to what autistics call "special interest"

Zero splinter skills

39 years old

Jobs:

Cashier, lot attendant (currently), actor, data entry clerk, communications contractor, record keeping associate

Plenty of unpaid internships

None of the jobs, I particularly liked or was good at

Zero job skills

Plenty to jobs had the nerve to make my worthless corpse redundant

Bad work history

It could have that I am not interested in anything because of am not good at anything

It could be a lot of different reasons

Correlation versus causation

____________________________

However if you want to find something you are interested in, you might try going to a library and looking, shelf by shelf, at what kind of things you might be interested in

Exhausted the Dewey decimal system

No topic will make you permanently happy. Speaking from many years experience special interests come and go, some more quickly than others, some inexpensive and some I've spent a small fortune on then lost interest.

How did you find your specific interest?

I have always had special interest. I remember at the age of 3, I dug a deep hole in the ground and began catching snakes and placing them in this hole. I was a snake collector. At one point in my life I decided to make the sharpest wooden pencil in the world. I spent hours sharpening the pencil. The thing about special interest, is that you do not have to have only ONE special interest. Over my lifetime I developed millions of special interest. I became an expert about the entire universe and how it operates. As a result, I know what happened before the BIG BANG. I can see the future with a fair degree of accuracy. The world is full of wonders but very few people actually can really see and comprehend them.

One word of advice. Be very careful about what you interpret as being true. Around 40 percent of what you are told is in reality false and misleading. Look at information from both sides. This is especially true when you are young. Perhaps when you reach the age of 50, you may be able to know a falsehood from reality. But it takes time to get to that point. So question everything. Open your eyes and see both sides before coming to the conclusions. It takes more work and effort but finding reality is a great gift.

If you’ve exhausted the Dewey Decimal System….why not try the Library of Congress System

Bloss: What makes you have difficulty driving? I had difficulty driving, and I didn’t get my license until age 37.

Bloss: What makes you have difficulty driving? I had difficulty driving, and I didn’t get my license until age 37.[/quote]


I am 23 and i got my license at 18.

Driving is hard for me due to cognitive issues I have.
I fail to recognize all the signals and I focus too much on those road signals instead of the road and the cars in front of me.
I get confused a lot when driving because stimulus don’t help, I get a lot of them and I lost control when I drive because I have to think and act very fast (i’m a maniac of control and I am used to a very slow pace in my life).

I drive btw, but just for a couple of kilometers before I am too tired to keep in driving, because the focus it requires for me totally exhaust me very quickly

My main special interest - music - seemed to happen by sheer chance. I was walking past my school one evening when I was about 9 years old, and I heard a pop group practising "I Like It" by Gerry & The Pacemakers. On the spot I decided that I wanted to be in a pop group, and began to obsessively work towards doing that. It was almost impossible to make any progress for a long time because I didn't have any musical instruments, money, or talent, so I just made do with what I could get my hands on. The original idea was to become as rich and popular as The Beatles, but I settled for just being able to perform and record music that I was fairly happy with, and being fairly popular when I performed. It's still one of the things I like doing the most, and I'm always hoping to do a performance that goes down better than any I've ever done, or make a recording that I'm more pleased with than ever before.

The job I got was a research lab technician, and the special interest and the job were mostly antagonistic to each other, except that the job provided the money for the music equipment etc., without which I probably wouldn't have been able to do much. I sometimes thought of "going professional" with music - either as a musician or providing musical services such as recording and producing, but there are quite a few holes in my music knowledge and abilities (although I can do a lot), so they'd never have considered me as a session musician, and I couldn't be at all sure any music job would pay well enough for me to even live on, and the science job was very stable and (by my standards) reasonably lucrative, so reluctantly I never gave it up to focus full-time on music. But I found many of the scientific aspects of my job interesting enough, and got a lot of satisfaction from doing experiments and designing scientific methods, though if science was a special interest of mine, it was definitely in second place to music.

Turning your special interest/skill into your work is also not necessarily a recipe for happiness. Just like you struggled with greek history just it was merely special-interest-adjacent, work will force you to engage in something similar.
I personally struggled with doing things for clients, and usually they weren't interested in or willing to pay for work at the level that I was interested in doing.

I have been drifting through special-interest-adjacent fields, and while I can find pleasure in some aspects of my work often, I also do a lot of googling to find out whether lighthousekeeping is still a job, because every other day, I can't imagine anything better than becoming a lighthouse keeper.

If you want me to be honest, Bloss, I would wish you would drive to work once you get that government job, if taking public transportation wouldn’t get you to your job. Government jobs are excellent security, most of the time, for autistics such as us. I am fortunate I got my government job.

I’m “cognitively challenged” as far as driving was concerned….but when I HAD to do it, I did it.

You did better than me getting your license at 18. You must be doing something right.

When I was young I was a poor driver. I had a few accidents and got a few speeding tickets. After a ticket they offered me the option to take a very specialized drivers education course which was taught by the police and they would drop my speeding fine. I took the course and it was really a good course. They taught me everything I needed to know to avoid getting tickets. I used these skills and have driven around a million miles since then without getting into an accident.

One of the primary skills they taught me was the 10 mph (16 kilometers per hour) rule. Whenever I drive, I keep one car length between me and the car in front of me for every 10 mph that I am driving. So if I am driving 60 mph (around 100 kilometers per hour), I keep 6 car lengths or around 90 feet (27 meters) distance from the car in front of me. That distance give me sufficient distance to avoid a collision should something go wrong.

Another thing they taught me was to know everything around me when I am driving. I not only watch what is happening in front of me but also what is happening to my right and left side and also what is happening behind me. ALL THE TIME

Also when I drive, I focus on driving and only driving. I do not do anything else but drive when I drive. When I drive my entire focus is only on driving.

If you like video games and reading about WWII, maybe you can write a text-based game about WWII. (I'm working on a book inspired by WWI.)

Agreed. There's this "what could be better than being paid for doing the very thing you love to do?" idea, but in practice a career would usually take away quite a lot of the freedom that the amateur enjoys. It would seem rare to find a job where the boss tells you to do exactly what you'd do anyway if you were left to your own devices. And self-employment is probably no better. The customer just becomes the boss. In neither situation are you likely to be able to work at your own pace. Of course it helps to have a job doing something you're at least interested in.