Interest Is Everything⁠↗

When you’re procrastinating on a project, wondering why your outwardly successful career doesn’t feel as vibrant as it could, or feeling stuck on a difficult life-choice, it’s worth asking if you’ve forgotten the importance of building your days, as far as you’re able, around what actually interests you.

in his book Creating a Life, the Jungian therapist James Hollis makes a powerful case that an interesting life – interesting to you, that is, not necessarily to other people – might in fact be the highest and best goal to which any of us could aspire.

Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.

is isn’t to say that success or money or influence or happiness won’t follow. I think they often do, because other people sense the aliveness in your pursuit of what interests you, and they respond to it. So there’s an asymmetry here: trying to pursue what others might deem interesting or impressive doesn’t seem to lead to feeling interested in it yourself; but pursuing what interests you does seem to evoke the interest of others. (Also, the former is counterproductively draining: “There’s a specific exhaustion,” observes the artist Dipa Halder, “that comes from constantly shape-shifting to fit what you think people want. I call it type 2 burnout. You’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.”)

Finally, there’s something importantly resilient about interest, too. Meaningful projects aren’t always fun; life certainly isn’t always easy; and the moment in history through which we’re living definitely isn’t calming and relaxing. But maybe it is always, or almost always, possible to find and pursue something that’s truly and enliveningly interesting about the place in life in which you find yourself, and the paths that are open to you to take.