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.
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.
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.
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.
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.