I envy the person who creates a depth of knowledge in anything.
A math teacher teaching his students, passionate about math or about teaching or both. I get consumed by the ability to spit ball complex facts, or facts of any nature. Sitting in calculus, if I didn’t know any better I would think my teacher and Isaac Newton were in a battle for knowledge and my teacher is currently producing straight heat. The math consumed me, I wanted to minor in it. But I solve math problems and get a sort of dopamine hit for whatever reason, and it takes my attention the way RuneScape would. It’s just harder to start. So I don’t know whether I want math or whether I want solving, and math is only where I happened to find it.
Anyone deeply interested in things drives me to want to be the same. People around you with the ability to deep dive is a blessing that should not be taken for granted. I had a coworker recently who was absolutely in love with war strategy games. He would go on for hours about it. Do I want to play them? Not in the slightest. Did he talk about it with such passion it inspired me? Yes, yes it did. I even looked at gameplay and realized it wasn’t for me, but regardless he was so into something that he looked for niche outcomes and techniques of an unbeatable battle.
So the question to myself becomes, is it depth? Passion can be short. Someone can be passionate about anything and tell me about it and that doesn’t mean they have stats to back it up, because they only have just begun.
I think it is depth. What still made it interesting was that it was something I knew nothing of. It isn’t the person I envy, it’s the state of knowledge having. Not how hard the thing is, how far in they’ve gone.
I have been there once. RuneScape. The hours glided, I was consumed by it. And I catch myself saying that one doesn’t count, because it’s useless to my future. But if depth is the thing and the subject doesn’t matter, then it counts, and I have already proven I can do it once. If it doesn’t count, then the subject does matter, and I don’t have a way of saying which subjects are worthy that isn’t just me deciding after the fact.
If depth is what I’m responding to, the next question is where it comes from. Nobody wants to always do something, and getting through the part where you don’t is discipline. Think of a degree, there are weed out classes that someone without passion cannot make it past. You find the passion by trying, you build the passion by not quitting, and the depth comes from the compounding interest of seeing things through.
Which leaves the problem of picking. At the end of the day you just have to try and hope you find that thing, and not everyone is lucky enough to. I have no way of knowing a subject is the one before going deep in it, and going deep is the expensive part.
There is a version of this where you spend your life looking for the right thing and never stay in one long enough for it to become the thing. That is what I have done my whole life already.
What gets given up is real. Parties, time with people. Not always, but often enough. I want to say I’d take that trade. Life has no given meaning, and the meaning I want to give it is depth of knowledge. Whether I would actually take it is not something I can answer from here, because I have never been far enough in to be asked.
Also published on substack.