No special interest

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mine change all the time

Got interested in laptops two or three years ago, now have 40 of them. That probably counts as a 'special interest'....

Do you keep breaking them, and keep them around for spare parts, 40? wtf. I have 2 laptops, and that more than i need. So you're collecting them, do you have like a old like windows 95 laptop in your collection, or are they all relatively new.

More than half of them are old IBM Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes from around 1998-2005. A few have Windows 98, but none with Windows 95. I got some of them very cheap on Ebay, eg a T40 Thinkpad for £1.99, a D420 Latitude for £5, but since the Covid outbreak the supply seems to have dried up, and the few on offer are at ludicrous prices. IBM T42 for £250 anyone? Not me, guvnor, lol!

I was gonna say, sounds expensive. £1.99, hah sounds like they was giving it away.

Cripes, I posted in a 'No Special Interest' thread when I obviously meant to post in the 'Special Interests?' thread. Shows the perils of drinking half a dozen bottles of beer late at night....

I myself experience special interests, but I will say not having them can be a good thing. I've changed my college major several times already because I picked them based off of what was interesting at the time -- something I cannot distinguish from what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.

I used to have issues with special interests being people, but that has ultimately passed. I suppose there is no downside to not having any special interests; it's good to have if you don't have anything else you're interested in.

Ever since I started taking antidepressants, my intense interests have waned. I'll probably always be interested in Star Trek but I won't have encyclopedic knowledge of it like my autistic flatmate has.

I think it's possible for somebody with ASD to have no particular special interest, certainly for a time, though I suppose it's rare. I think special interests are just things that often happen as a result of something more primary that's going on in the brain, but they don't necessarily always happen all the time. That primary something may be a strong tendency to focus on detail and a deeply gratifying sense of satisfaction from really looking at something in depth.

I've certainly had special interests, and potentially I still do, though currently my day-to-day behaviour isn't really showing any particular subject or activity as a special interest. In a way I wish it would, because I get a lot of pleasure out of getting obsessed with a subject and developing my skills and expertise in it, and I tend to get morbid and bored without such a thing to exercise my brain.

Having said that, I'm not perfectly happy while immersed in a special interest, because I'm aware of how being too immersed in such an interest can impact badly on the rest of my life, so I can't really indulge without also feeling a degree of nagging anxiety that I'm living the life of the Nowhere Man in the movie Yellow Submarine, lost in an analytical world that's ultimately extremely lonely and a rather pitiful waste of my life. There's always been a conflict in me between special interests and social needs, and the time when I was happiest was when I hardly bothered with special interests at all because I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people of a kind I could really relate to, so I spent nearly all my time in their company.

Even then I wasn't perfectly happy, because it would annoy me that the almost constant presence of friends in my life meant that I "couldn't get anything done." It must be great to be able to strike a balance between social activities and lone special interests, perhaps even fusing the two together by sharing special interests with others who feel the same fascination, but I was never able to find people who were fascinated by exactly the same things that fascinated me, and I was never able to find a "switch" I could throw at will in order to go from social to special interest and back.