There is this strange phenomena whereby people feel bad for not being interested in things. I haven't heard of a name for this idea, so I'll coin one now: interest guilt. Interest guilt may be a product of a related concept which I'll call interest shaming. Interest shaming is the annoying, often elitist, behavior of faulting people for not developing an interest in particular things. Interest guilt may be thought of as internalized, auto-interest shaping.
What does this look like?
"Ooooh. You're not interested in politics? How could you not care about what's going on in the world around you? Wow."
Or in an Asian American context:
"How come you aren't interested in your culture? Why don't you speak Chinese? Don't you care about your heritage?"
Often interest shaming comes from people in some sort of authority position. A (bad) instructor, for instance, may yell at students for not doing some reading. A parent may fault their children for failing to take up the same hobbies as them. An unsympathetic communist may scorn you for your lack of class-consciousness.
Evidently, interest shaming is often counter productive in getting people interested in things. Not only does it make some really bad vibes, it makes people internalize messages like:
- My Spanish is bad (so I won't even try speaking it); though I am interested in it...
- I'm not a math person. I wish I could just be interested in it like those A+ students...
- I just don't understand politics. It's all bullshit.
The especially conscientious and disciplined may even go ahead doing the activities that are supposed to be interesting to them. Yours truly , for instance, is one person that took up the task of studying a bunch of Chinese. Sometimes, good results can come out of this—eventually, being interest shamed into doing something, a person may develop a genuine interest in something. This though, I will argue, doesn't happen because the interest shaming worked, but rather because people know (sometimes subconsciously, sometimes consciously) how to make things interesting to them and will often succeed in developing an interest in something despite shaming/nagging, not as a positive consequence of it.
Interest Rates
So, what sort of things do people actually become interested in? My suggestion is that people become interested in things that aren't boring. I'll illustrate this with one graph and no numbers.
Boredom (which I'll take here to loosely mean "lack of interest in X") can be thought of as coming in two main species: I'm bored because ACTIVITY is too easy, or I'm bored because ACTIVITY is too hard. The crude drawing provided here puts relative difficulty on the x-axis and interest on the y-axis. I can't remember where I first heard this idea, but if I can find that source I'll update this post to include that information. I believe it was reading about the concept of flow, which is well worth checking out if you're interested in what's interesting...
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| Figure 1: Global Interest Rates in Difficulty Dollars |
By this simplistic model, there exists some optimal level of difficulty for stimulating interest.
What happens when we do interest shaming is that Difficulty is inflated. The incentives get messed up. We take already hard-to-do tasks (to the right of the optimum market in red at the top of the blue curve) and make them harder by adding annoying behavior into the equation. If a student already finds mathematics difficult, nagging parents don't make them enjoy math more; it makes doing math even harder. Medication, sheer-self discipline, and other factors may allow the shamed one to eventually develop their own interest in some subject, but we didn't help make that, besides perhaps by playing the villain the shamed one can resent.
Objective Ways to Improve Subjective Experience
Here's a claim—people tend to be interested in things they are (relatively) good at.
To help ourselves and others be interested in things then, we ought to cast aside interest shame and purge ourselves of internal interest guilt and instead focus on the positive project of making things we think should be interesting to us actually interesting to us.
Stepping back to step forward
One source of discouragement in building competence at something is the perception that it's just too hard. A lot of the time, things do indeed feel too hard because they actually are too hard.
A beginning pianist should not immediately tackle playing a very difficult piece. It would be much faster to work up towards playing that difficult piece by playing progressively more difficult pieces that build the foundation necessary to play that target difficult piece. Only then should that difficult piece be seriously attempted. Otherwise, injury, frustration, and other setbacks may kill interest.
Taking steps backward and working on fundamentals is something that takes a fair degree of self-knowledge and humility to do. Do I really have to review what summation is if I've taken 2 years of college level calculus? You very may have to if you really want to proceed with working on some interesting problems that require a very solid understanding of summation. You may have not learned very much in 2 years of college level calculus. But it is not too late to make up for just getting by then. Am I seriously reviewing a first year Icelandic textbook after four years of study? That may be a smart move if some first year fundamentals are lacking.
Building up Complexity
As we grow more skillful in some activity (e.g. playing the piano), we are able to do more complex things. Things that were once difficult (e.g. playing sixteenth notes evenly) become easy with practice. This isn't just for activities that we typically think of as physical, but for more abstract, mental hurdles we have to hop over as well. The first time you try to do something with some software, it is probably slow and painful because you don't know where the buttons to press to do the thing are. How do I adjust the margins of a paper in a word processor? Google senpai, please halp!!
However, as we work through problems, we become more familiar with our tools and earlier issues that seemed insurmountable become trivial.
Reasoning by analogy, we are also able to take previously learned solutions to new tasks. Indeed, the act of searching/Googling is a complex, acquired skill that some people are better at than others. This is why telling your family member that is asking you to help fix a printer to "just Google it" isn't very helpful—the Google-fu is likely weak in that family member.
Unsolicited advice...
I repeat these things to myself here, as things I wish I considered earlier, but also things that I am now able to consider now and move forward with.
Accepting that interest is something that can be cultivated by building up complexity (of skills, knowledge, etc.), you don't have to wander around asking yourself "what is interesting to me?". Instead, you can focus on developing the ability to solve problems that are already apparent as important issues to address to you. Different problems will become relevant at different times, but certain themes will likely unite those problems together and certain tools will likely be broadly applicable.
Don't ask "is math interesting to me?" but instead find out how to make it interesting to you if building mathematical foundations seems like a good skill to have under your belt. Be humble and don't trust that institutions (e.g. schooling) has built a solid foundation for you for whatever you're working on just because you parked your butt in certain places at certain times. Instead, take charge to learn how to check yourself. Strive for excellence.
Make the things that you care about interesting to other people. Don't become cynical and think people are stupid that don't find the same things interesting as you. Likewise don't be fearful and think that everyone else is succeeding except you because they have all found their magical elusive interests. Instead, be humble and know that different things are interesting to people at different times. And be courageous going forward, having faith that you can cultivate interests you decide upon.
Do also, be realistic about the timeline in front of you. I jokingly said to myself at around age 13 (I think) that I was officially too old to be a child prodigy. That sounds about right. Resources (here I'm mostly thinking time and attention) are scarce and is impossible to be interested in everything and to cultivate skills in everything. So, choose your (relatively) narrow path, keep your communication channels open to other people walking other paths of interest to you, and do an excellent job wherever you find yourself. And, do negotiate to be in places you want to be. Choose the role you want to be in, and make a position for yourself if what you wan't isn't out there for the taking.
Labels: Chinese, culture, psychology, workflow
