Mar 17, 2010
I’ve got plenty of issues, we all do. But the one I keep coming back to, the problem I face and will continue to face for the foreseeable future is finding out what it is I’m interested in, what I want to do about it, who I am. Hopefully, if I can figure that out, the rest of it — life — will just fall into place.
I know myself well enough now, to know that I’ll likely forget the specifics of this article within a few days, the drive I felt while writing it, how good it made me feel to craft something, and that I should keep doing that so as too keep feeling that. And to do it often. But each time I run this cycle going from boredom and frustration, to doing something about it and getting motivated, to getting complacent and slipping back into inactivity, I feel like I learn more about how to prolong the good times and curb the shitty times just that little bit more. Things like scheduling blocks of time to use my brain creatively, or simple things like just deleting those fucking links to time killing sites that host almost no stimulating content whatsoever from my browser.
The other side of the coin is that it looks so simple on paper, yet in reality a tiny percentage of people actually ever figure this all out practically. For whatever reason, the vast majority of people live an entirely unremarkable life. It’s almost as if there is a club for people that have “made it” in terms of satisfaction with their lives. Just being content and confident in the person they are, and using that confidence as a springboard to creating something in their area of interest, and in doing so further boosting their confidence in some sort of self-esteem rich get self-esteem richer scenario. I want to be in that club, but statistically speaking, I don’t have a chance.
So what’s the answer? I still don’t have one myself, but it’s not for lack of ideas. I’m interested in a lot of things: Web and technology culture, general cultural and historical studies, music, bikes, design, photography, basketball, so on, so forth. Increasingly though I’ve noticed a common thread, and I’m hoping to develop it further. It’s that in all the above areas, the things that I find myself thinking about most are the “meta” aspects. With technology and the web, it’s not that I’m so interested in the products or services or strategies being spoken about, but the difference in opinions and approaches and schools of thought on a given subject. With bikes, it’s not the machines and their components themselves, but the culture around the bicycle, the differences between public perception of them as a part of the landscape, and the stark contrast between how much, and what kind of attention they’re given by people in a country like Denmark to people in Australia/UK/USA. With basketball, I will rarely watch a game, yet will regularly check in on the goings on of the teams’ back offices, and the fortunes of those teams based on the culture they cultivate in their club. The common thread then, is that perhaps there’s a way to tap into that interest in the underlying layer of a given topic, and to analyse it at that very fundamental root.
At a basic level, I’m interested in the reason that I find a topic, opinion, something interesting. Why is it that I find myself nodding my head in agreement with person A and shaking that same head in incredulity at person B. What is it about person A’s character, upbringing, point of view that speaks to me, holds my interest, speaks loud enough to be heard above the rest of the clatter?
This is what I hope to find out. It will happen slowly, this I know. There will be times when progress will be measured in negatives. But hopefully, after each cycle I come out the other side slightly more enlightened as to what it is I want to be doing and saying, and how I can make that a more substantial part of my life.