Can you make yourself intentionally interested in a topic?
What you can do:
- stop drinking, using drugs and passively consuming shit
- swim/exercise the body
- study what you're passionate about
- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams
- long walks in nature to think about it deeper, periods where you remove yourself away from people
- balance your interests with sustainable living, because you're not doing it just to score big!
Not so sure people can will themselves to change that much.
You can enjoy life, cultivate what works and hedge your bets, in that order. By following your core life-theme and ideas, you should become more of what you already are.
Didn’t take long before I could look at a Go board and get sucked in, or at least have a fairly profound aesthetic experience if it was a nice configuration.
Took a lot longer with math, and there what I get is generally like reading about a nice idea from a sci-for short story.
I don’t think this would work without some genuine interest/curiosity in the subject to begin with though. And there were times with both where I was intimidated or there were tasks I needed to do in order to improve that I didn’t want to do, which seems fine as long as there’s a larger portion of gratifying experience.
Only 2 points seem timeless:
- study what you're passionate about
- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams
There is value in relaxing, there is value in letting go of control and following your impulses. Trying to drive out all fun may lead to a more productive life, but at the cost of a pleasurable life.
There are many ways to do this, like meditation, or some substances.
You basically imagine yourself in the future, having achieved some goal, or being in a situation that you like. This image has to be rich and invoke many emotions, so it becomes engraved in your neural paths.
You then work backwards from there, imagining different roads and specific steps on how to achieve that.
It literally and physically changes your brain over time, as you repeat it.
But being obsessively interested in one/few of them is a completely different matter -- a lot of other "normal" aspects of life tend to suffer as a side-effect. Our society does not do a good job of nurturing and encouraging such lopsided profiles, and trying to keep that spark alive while leading a "normal" life extracts an incredibly heavy cost. Understandably, most "normal" people (instinctively) find that to be a cost not worth paying. Embedded in contemporary society, few such people manage to pursue their interest to their satisfaction, and fewer do well enough to be considered "successful" by society (a vanishing fraction become outstandingly successful, and are then called "geniuses").
If you’re not curious about the world in general, then I’m not sure anything can change that trajectory, although I could be wrong.
For a specific topic, I recommend learning about that topic from someone who is passionate about it and who is a good teacher.
Sometimes this can be as easy as reading books by a good author. When I was in high school, I despised history. It turns out that I despised it because I had never been exposed to compelling history. I ended up becoming friends with someone who was a passionate historian, and he pointed me to compelling resources that totally changed my mind about history.
In college, I had no interest in art or art classes. A friend of mine took a drawing class that she said “blew her mind”. I couldn’t believe it, but she just told me to trust her and take the class. I asked a few other people, and they all said the same thing. I took the class, and they were all correct. While the topic was technically drawing, the professor pushed us to explore what our drawing told us about ourselves, how we could expand our minds through drawing, and how our drawing related to our interactions with the world. Just re-reading that, it sounds like hippy-dippy bullshit, but to experience it was something else, and it is something most participants in that class took away in a positive way.
I ended up minoring in art, and I worked with another professor who really stretched my mind.
While these are my personal experiences (and there are many more that I didn’t mention), I think I have seen this pattern amongst my friends and acquaintances as well. As such, I recommend finding a good, highly recommended, talented teacher if you want to get interested in a new topic. Note that they are not always easy to find.
But with solar energy systems, there are a lot of intricacies and compromises and learning electronics is very rewarding.
The downside is that I seem to lose interest very quickly, once I solve my particular problem. But I still learn a lot and have fun in the meantime.
Eh, I had a large collection. I still have a collection of a few hundred tickets (not worth much, a few hundred pounds). I started the collection in about 1997. I stopped in about 2003. I've never shown other collectors my tickets, and I've only put about 5 tickets online and that was only this year.
I think for this obsessional collecting it's really not about other people. It's about systematizing and categorising the world. Outside is chaos and confusion. In here, with this collection, there is order and control.
However, I think that a prerequisite to this is to be a naturally curious person.
A lot of people with fixed and repetitive interests in something will be autistic. I'd be interested to know what the ratios are for autistic vs not for people who have this kind of obsessive interest.