Somewhere in your home, there’s probably a box holding the versions of you that never came to be. The box is a metaphor for the hobbies, passions and once-loved pursuits you abandoned: the guitar in the corner, the paints and the easel, the woodworking tools. Everyone’s box holds something different. Inside yours lie the guitarist you, the painter you, the woodworker you.

But what do you feel when you walk past that box? Shame? Guilt? Do you promise yourself you’ll come back to it soon?

And have you ever wondered where that guilt comes from?

The way I see it, it comes from a moment we all reach: the moment life asks us to choose one road and walk it. And most often we choose the road of work, of a profession, leaving everything else in the box. What makes me think so? Try asking yourself, or the people around you, a simple question: who are you? In most cases the answer will have something to do with what they do for a living.

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So maybe the guilt isn’t about laziness at all. Maybe it appeared the moment you chose to focus on one thing, and in doing so denied yourself a fuller, more varied life.

Two insults that used to be compliments

When someone wants to say you’re not taking something seriously enough, they reach for one of two words: amateur or dilettante.

Both are used to describe a person who grabs at a bit of everything, flits from place to place and never goes deep enough to achieve anything meaningful. But let’s look at where these words come from.

Amateur came into English from French, and before that from the Latin amator: a lover, one who loves. Someone who does a thing not for money or status, but out of love for it.

Dilettante comes from the Italian dilettare: to delight, to give pleasure. A dilettante was a person who took delight in something, particularly in the arts and sciences.

Both words began their lives as compliments. And both turned sour remarkably fast: by the end of the eighteenth century, as the idea of the “professional” was taking root, amateur and dilettante already meant someone who was merely dabbling. The one who loves and the one who delights had become insults. As if there were something wrong with either.

The narrowing of our interests

It’s hard to say exactly how people in the distant past felt about someone holding many interests at once. But we can trace, through certain words, when such people began to be looked down on.

Take the English word scientist. Before the 1830s it didn’t exist. People who studied nature were called natural philosophers or cultivators of science. The word was coined by William Whewell, and it first appeared in print in his review of Mary Somerville’s book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. That book was admired precisely because it showed how astronomy, physics, chemistry and geography connect to one another.

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Stop and think about that. The word we now use for a narrow specialist first appeared as praise for someone who joined different fields together.

Around the same time, a very different idea was reshaping how people worked. In 1776, Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with a description of a small pin workshop. He explained that making a pin was divided into roughly eighteen separate operations, and that a workshop of just ten people, some of them performing two or three of those operations, produced more than forty-eight thousand pins a day. Working alone, he wrote, each of them might not have made even twenty.

It was a powerful argument, and history has borne it out. Specialization gave us surgeons, engineers and people who can land a spacecraft on a comet. It’s hard to imagine achieving any of that without narrow expertise.

But there’s a part that gets quoted far less often. Later in the same book, Smith warned about what narrow specialization does to people. A man who spends his whole life performing a few simple operations, he wrote, “generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

Those are harsh words, and they were written about the most monotonous factory labour of his time, not about a doctor or an engineer today. But the worry behind them is worth hearing. Even the man who argued most forcefully for specialization saw that narrowing a person carries a cost.

Specialization is a good thing, and many people are happy living that way. But it is only ONE way to live. One, among an infinite number of others.

The grief of standing at a fork

Now let’s go back to our box. Inside it: the guitarist, the painter, the woodworker. Each of them was real for a while. Each had a future and a place in your imagination. And then life asked you to be responsible and make a choice, and at that fork you took one road and killed off every other possibility.

It’s a small death, and we carry it inside us for years.

We have rituals for many kinds of loss, but none for this one. Nobody sends flowers when you stop painting or playing the guitar. So the feeling goes underground and comes back wearing a different face, one that looks a lot like guilt: I never finish anything. I’m so scattered. What’s wrong with me?

People with many interests are often told their problem is a lack of discipline. Perhaps what they’re really carrying is something else: unlived grief, disguised as flakiness and laziness.

And the seemingly sensible advice to pick one thing is a reliable way to make that grief permanent. But following every impulse risks leaving you exactly where you started, forever.

So how do you hold this without suffering? I’d like to offer two ideas.

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Every passion has its own season

Let’s start from the assumption that interests don’t die. They have their own timing. They’re like a plant through the turning of the year: for a certain stretch, they have your time and your energy.

Some interests are resting. They’re paused, not gone. Some you’ll say goodbye to completely, and that’s fine too, because they’ve already given you what they came to give.

The guitar in the corner is a season that has ended. It taught you rhythm, patience, and the feeling of a breakthrough, when you play badly for weeks and then suddenly it clicks. That skill hasn’t gone anywhere. It lives in you and shapes how you learn everything else.

Seen this way, the museum of unlived lives becomes something different: not something to mourn, but a toolbox, or a harvest already gathered.

All your interests are connected, and they solve one problem

When you ask someone to list their interests, every item on the list looks random: football, cooking, psychology, photography, coding, hiking, flags. But interests are rarely random. Far more often they’re different answers to the same question, a question you’ve been asking your whole life without ever saying it out loud.

Look closely at one person’s interests and you’ll find they all circle around how do you make something complicated simple? For another, it’s an attempt to create something. For a third, it’s the drive to understand how things work on the inside.

And what about you? You can test this tonight. Take a sheet of paper and write down three things:

• What you do when you lose track of time.

• What in the world irritates you enough that you want to fix it.

• What people keep coming to you for, even when you never offered.

Then look for the question that sits underneath all three.

(If you’d like to do this in a structured way, with room to write and a plan for what comes next, I’ve put together a printable workbook called Many Interests, Better Life (available on Amazon or Gumroad (digital printable version)). But honestly, paper and a pen are enough to begin.)

In almost every case, that question will have nothing to do with your profession or with any specific skill or task. What it gives you instead is the direction your interests point in. And a direction matters far more than a job title or an occupation, because it leaves room for a great many tools, approaches and ways of working.

When you find that direction, something interesting happens to your “scattered” life.

Your interests stop competing with each other. Photography helps your teaching. Psychology helps your cooking, because now you’re thinking about what food means to people. You may discover that your interests are far more connected than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

And that changes everything. When someone understands their direction, they tend to rest better, choose friends differently, spend money more deliberately, and feel that evening ache far less often as they walk past the box.

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This, I think, is the kind of seriousness our culture has forgotten. Not the seriousness of narrowing, but the seriousness of joining together: taking all of yourself seriously at once.

Back to what’s in your box

Here’s what I’d suggest.

Tonight, or this weekend, open the box. Literally, if there is one. Take out the sketchbook, the guitar, the half-read book. Don’t make any plans yet. Just hold each thing in your hands and ask two questions:

What did this give me?
And: what was I really looking for when I picked it up?

You might be surprised how often the answers rhyme.

The amateur was the one who loved. The dilettante was the one who knew how to take delight. Maybe the goal was never to stop being them.

If you want to go further

If this piece stirred something in you and you’d like to keep going, I made something for exactly that.

Many Interests, Better Life is a printable workbook for people who’ve been told they have too many interests. It helps you find the question that connects them, let go of the guilt over “unfinished” passions, and use your particular combination to make your life happier, more successful, better paid and fuller.

It isn’t a course, and it won’t hand you the one right answer. It’s a companion for a few quiet evenings with a pen and paper.

Get the workbook → AMAZON or GUMROAD (downloadable digital version)

P.S. If this reminded you of someone — a friend with twelve hobbies, or a colleague who secretly draws beautifully — send it their way. They may need to hear that the dilettante was a lover.

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In the place I come from, people often told: “Want much, get little.” It wasn’t some kind of supportive Slavic wisdom (slavs aren’t generally inclined to support one another). With this phrase, our parents would always painfully bring us children back down to earth if we suddenly started daydreaming.

I wasn’t satisfied with this state of affairs, so all my life I looked for confirmation that wanting a lot is good, that wanting a lot is useful. As it turned out, almost all of Western (mostly American) culture was built on this desire to have it all. This fired me up and inspired me. I gladly adopted this mindset for myself, soaking it in and hoping it would work for me too.

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Years passed, the number of my desires grew, but with every new wish, I realize more clearly that the traumatic phrase from my childhood actually works better for me. There is no magic or sorcery here, there is a critical bug in our modern world, or perhaps in our very nature.

What do I want?

I really do want a lot. See for yourself:

I want to finish the book I’ve been writing for 12 years.

I want to relaunch my career.

I have many ideas for Notion templates that I want to implement.

I have three ideas for new projects and startups that I want to try and launch.

I want to start a YouTube channel and show everyone the world as I see it.

I want to learn to play the electric guitar.

My bookshelf can no longer hold everything I want to read, and my “watch later” movie list exceeds the lifespan of the universe in total runtime.

This list is constantly growing, but the larger it gets, the fewer items are crossed off.

I am not lazy, nor am I a procrastinator. I don’t just “want”; I work 10 hours every day. I’ve been doing this for years, but my progress in each of these directions is so negligible that it’s easier to say it doesn’t exist. I try to take a step in every direction, but I don’t even get close to a single goal; I am simply being torn to pieces by an unnaturally high internal tension. There are only 24 hours in my day (likely the same as yours), but in that time, I need to manage to move forward for real, even if just a little. It can’t go on like this.

What to do about it?

Recently, I discovered Essentialism (thanks to the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown). Its essence is that you must give up everything unimportant and secondary, focusing only on what truly matters - that’s the idea and the theory. I am trying to practice this approach using the app MyTao: One goal at a time.

The core principles of Essentialism:

The Art of Focus: The essentialist looks for the most important thing and discards everything else.

Deliberate Choice: Instead of trying to do everything, a person chooses where to invest their time and energy.

The Ability to Say “No”: Rejecting unimportant tasks for the sake of being able to say “yes” (always say yes, they said) to what is truly a priority.

The Principle of “Less but Better”: This isn’t about how to get more things done, but how to do only the right things.

The difference between an Essentialist and a Non-essentialist:

A Non-essentialist thinks that “everything is important,” “I have to do this,” and “I can do it all.” An Essentialist believes that “almost everything is noise,” “I choose what to do,” and “I can do anything, but not everything.”

This approach helps avoid burnout and achieve greater success by directing all efforts toward a narrow circle of key goals.

What has Essentialism given me?

I managed to make progress on several tasks that had sat untouched for months.

It showed me in practice that multitasking is a myth. No matter how much you believe in yourself, constant task-switching, distractions, and keeping multiple goals in your head only slow you down.

As it turns out, it is very difficult to immerse yourself in solving one big task if the monkey in your head is juggling ten others. Yes, you can perform several tasks at once, but each will be of mediocre quality at best, without sufficient depth or a strong creative component. For some tasks, that’s enough, but not for all.

The first results show that Essentialism works. If you focus on one goal, you move forward much faster than you think. In three days, I resolved a dozen tasks that I had been putting off for four months. However, the sheer number of them in the backlog is still scary as hell.

I also realized that I can’t master everything on my own. I wanted to be a “one-man army” who could do everything solo, but it turned out to be impossible. SEO, ASO, development, design, planning, implementation, sales, meetings, certifications - everything in our world has become so complex that you can no longer manage alone. You need to look for people or tools to whom you can delegate certain tasks.

FOMO. Now I am afraid of missing out on everything. I see the list of my desires, I see how I am crossing them out or postponing them indefinitely (likely forever), and I am gripped by panic that I will never be able to fulfill them. When I was grabbing at everything at once, I had at least an illusory hope and a deceptive feeling that I was getting closer to them. Now, my soul bleeds from the realization that not everything is within my control.

The whole world, in its (often toxic) positivity, teaches us that we can achieve anything, be anyone, and get everything we want. It gives us ideas, gives us tools, and shows us the way. We are just about to touch the desired goal. And this same world uses all its distractions at full blast to keep you from getting any closer to your dreams. All that remains is to make a choice and find your own path.

I would be very interested to know how you handle fulfilling your dreams. Have you found “that one” solution? Care to share?

Yours,

Leon

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Have you ever watched kittens chasing their tails, balls of yarn, their owners’ feet, or sunbeams? Are they doing it for fun? Yes and no. For mammals, play is primarily a way to learn and explore the world. And what we see as innocent entertainment is a full-fledged, essential, and very necessary learning process. The most interesting thing is that once, for humans too, learning through play was the natural and only correct path.

So many things in our lives we take for granted: mandatory education, the separation of life into "work" and "play," and hierarchical structures in companies. It’s hard for us to imagine it could be otherwise, but the unpleasant surprise is that this wasn't always the case. In fact, from a historical perspective, this state of affairs is quite recent. We used to live differently.

When Learning == Playing

For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. We lived a nomadic life, hunting animals and gathering berries and fruits, and when supplies ran out, we'd leave our settled place and search for a new one. In those days, there were no schools: children learned by playing. They explored the world, imitated adults, crafted tools, and hunted in their games. Their curiosity was the main teacher, and their motivation was internal and natural. Adults didn't force them to learn; they simply created an environment where it was possible. Life was one big, exciting process where play and work were inseparable.

And then came agriculture...

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What Changed?

With the transition to farming, people began to work longer and more monotonously. To feed growing families, they had to plow, sow, and care for livestock. This labor was hard and boring. Children, who used to play and explore, became cheap labor (and there had to be a lot of children). Their natural curiosity and willfulness became an obstacle that needed to be suppressed. The new way of life required discipline (how else could you force yourself to live such a boring existence?).

The further development of feudalism and the Industrial Revolution cemented this model: children were sent to work in factories and workshops, where obedience was the main virtue. They had to do the same thing over and over. The slightest disobedience was met with brutal punishment. Life turned into a harsh, regimented process, and play became something insignificant, a short break that had to be earned.

To this day, in many societies, play is still seen as a waste of time.

Over time, industries became more complex. Simple manual labor no longer brought as much value, the economy needed educated people who could handle increasingly complex machines and understand the intricacies of farming. This is how the idea of mandatory education emerged. Curricula were rigidly structured, and lessons were conducted through rote memorization and repetition. The teacher played the role of the overseer, and the student was the obedient worker. This model proved so effective that it is still used everywhere.

The Price We Pay

What does this historical evolution mean for us today? We grew up in a system that convinced us that:

Learning is work, not play. We believe that learning something new is a difficult, tedious process that requires self-discipline and coercion.

Curiosity is an unreliable compass. We expect that there's a smart textbook or an instruction manual somewhere that will give us an algorithm for solving problems. Curiosity, personal interests, and individual search have become unreliable sources of data.

Hierarchy is natural. We look for a mentor, a boss, or a "guru" to tell us what to do, instead of exploring and creating ourselves. There's always someone higher, smarter, and more competent.

This way of thinking permeates every area of our lives. It influences how we build careers, how we raise our children, and even how we organize our weekends. We look for ready-made instructions, are afraid of making mistakes, and lose the ability for independent, creative thinking.

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HOW DO WE LIVE WITH THIS?

It might seem that with this article, I'm proposing a revolution of the current order, but that’s not the case. I just wanted to remind you that our way of life and our habits are not something we were born with; they are not natural. This is just a relatively young way of organizing society that we invented for ourselves. At the time, it did a good job of meeting the needs of our society. However, society has changed: only a small percentage of people now work in fields or factories. Consequently, our approach can be re-evaluated or, at the very least, enriched by incorporating new elements. And we don't have to turn our society upside down. Everyone can start with themselves.

How to Break the Cycle?

Each of us can "reprogram" our thinking. Here are a few simple and practical tips.

Get back to playing. Don't be afraid to do something you are genuinely interested in without a specific goal or outcome. Play is a powerful driver of creativity and learning. Try to learn something that seems completely unrelated to your work, just out of pure curiosity.

Ask questions. Instead of passively receiving information, ask questions. Why is this so? What if we tried it differently? Switch off the internal student and turn on the internal explorer.

Become a facilitator. In your family, at work, in relationships—instead of being the "teacher" who knows everything, become someone who creates an environment where others can grow and learn independently. It's much harder, but far more effective.

Our history doesn't determine our future. It explains why we are who we are, but it doesn't obligate us to stay that way. Breaking free from old paradigms is a real, practical path to a more conscious and fulfilling life.

What rules that you once considered unshakable now seem like mere historical artifacts to you?

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Disclaimer: Welcome to the first issue of the Humaniaq newsletter (yes, that’s us, we created those Notion templates you downloaded and, we hope, still use). In our newsletter, we talk about how to keep your humanity, peace, creativity, and sanity in the age of the efficiency cult, FOMO, and other obsessions. Thank you again for trusting us!

We were raised in a world that teaches us that success is the ultimate goal. Career growth, a beautiful life on social media, recognition - we chase it all like a mirage on the horizon, hoping that one day we'll finally feel good enough. But what if this race isn't a path to happiness, but a systemic trap?

The idea, brilliantly described by Tara McMullin, is called the "Validation Spiral." It's not just personal burnout, but a fundamental aspect of our culture that permeates all areas of our lives. Its core lies in the fact that in the modern world, being content is unprofitable. If we were completely satisfied with our lives, status, and possessions, why would we need to buy anything else? Why would we work more and better? Why would we try to get more approval?

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The market is built on the idea of constant dissatisfaction. It has to make us feel like we're missing something, that we're not beautiful enough, not successful enough, not smart enough. That's why we're constantly seeking validation and trying to boost our sense of importance.

Corporate Culture: The Cult of Busyness

This spiral is especially clear in the business world. Instead of rewarding quality and results, many companies encourage quantity and busyness. We take on more projects, work overtime, and answer emails on weekends. We do this to feel important and irreplaceable, to get validation from our managers and colleagues.

In the modern office, being "free" is seen as a weakness. We always have to be "in the loop," "in the flow," and "super busy." This isn't a sign of effectiveness but a kind of defense mechanism that proves our worth. We do more than we can, but this path doesn't lead to success - it leads to rapid burnout.

Brands: Selling Concepts, Not Products

Brands also participate in this game. They serve as a powerful reflection and amplifier of cultural norms. Branding has long ceased to be just a logo. It's a powerful concept that shapes our reality, convincing us that our value is directly tied to what we consume.

Technology isn't just a gadget, it's a symbol of innovation and status.

Clothes are a way to express your creativity or belonging to a certain group.

Online courses sell not knowledge, but the promise of a "new" and "successful" life.

We buy these products to appropriate these concepts and get a temporary sense of validation. But when that feeling fades, we start looking for the next product or course, getting caught in an endless cycle.

Social Norms: Chasing Validation in Every Aspect of Life

The "Validation Spiral" also permeates our social lives. It affects how we build relationships, raise children, and even how we relax.

In relationships: We often strive for the "perfect" social media image to get validation from others. Instead of building healthy, deep connections, we focus on how our relationships look from the outside. If the relationship doesn't match that image, we feel uncomfortable (we don't consider that even the ideal picture might be fake).

In parenting: Parents caught in the "Validation Spiral" can unknowingly pass it on to their children. They sign them up for dozens of clubs and activities to show other parents how talented and successful their child is, and therefore, how good they are as parents. But what happens if something suddenly goes wrong?

In leisure: Even on vacation, we seek validation. Trips turn into a race for the "perfect" photos, not a way to relax and get new experiences. We go to popular places not because we want to, but because "everyone else has been there," and we have to keep up.

How to Escape the Trap?

Breaking this spiral isn't easy. It's deeply ingrained in our cultural DNA. But it's possible if we make a fundamental shift in our thinking from seeking external validation to finding satisfaction and value within ourselves.

Detach your self-worth from your achievements. Your value isn't defined by your resume or salary. It's who you are, regardless of your successes or failures.

Recognize concepts. Learn to see when brands, companies, or social norms are selling you validation, not genuine value. Ask yourself:

Embrace "enough." Stop constantly looking for the "best" and the "newest." Understand that your current job, your relationships, your phone are good enough right now.

Escaping the "Validation Spiral" isn't about giving up on success. It's about defining for yourself what success truly is. It's not external attributes or the approval of others. It's inner wholeness, contentment, and a mindful approach to yourself and the world.

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