Pursue Your Interests

After receiving many requests from others, I will be releasing a book on all of the topics covered in this blog. Add your email here to be notified when it’s released and get access to the signed early copies.

Because of the availability of distractions, and the presence of underlying psychological turmoil that motivates use of those distractions, identifying your interests, pursuing those interests, or doing work that will allow you to pursue your interests, is now more important than ever.

Pursue your interests from a career perspective and surround yourself with people you care about. Pursuing interests is the most powerful way to engage the self and imbue energy and meaning into life, and into the moment, to the degree that transcends the pains. It requires sacrifices, but those sacrifices are generally worth it.

By pursuing my interests, I alleviate internal stress and make it easier to engage in solitude in a feedback loop that continually reduces stress and makes solitude easier to engage in. While pursuing interests can carry other stresses — like financial stresses — figuring out how to engage with interests in an appropriate, sustainable way — can be a valuable way to alleviate stress and efficiently channel anxiety.

It is important to pursue interests to imbue meaning in life, because we seek out stimulation — distractions — often in a drug like manner to combat the lack of natural meaning in our lives.

By not pursuing interests, we are separated from things we derived meaning from and thus feel like we are living a more meaningless life; with difficulty being alone and facing that reality, we instead turn to our devices, to money, to drugs, to satiate us — we are more vulnerable to the distractions in our lives and our new digital environment.

After receiving many requests from others, I will be releasing a book on all of the topics covered in this blog. Add your email here to be notified when it’s released and get access to the signed early copies.

Pursue Your Interests was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.