Be more than just a pickleball guy
Be someone worth knowing
Checking your social media for each and every like, comment, and retweet is a sure sign that you have disconnected your soul from your own light and rely on the light of others to keep it alive. You don’t trust yourself to decide whether your life is well-lived, and have to be informed by others which direction to turn and which paths to follow. Your actions are not done to feed your inner child’s delight, but to beg the attention of others who might deem you interesting.
But you are not interesting.
You are playing a role of someone who is interesting, so that you can be given the same cookie a mouse gets when he goes through the research maze. If you want to pull that value back in and cease to be a shell of yourself and a mirror to the desires of others you have to curate an inner self. To ever be a complete human, deeply immersed in your life, you have to stop letting the world have a say in your behaviors and pursuits.
You have to be interesting to yourself, first.
The -ing ending of interesting makes it a verb, something that someone is doing. Like an explorer is exploring, an interester is interesting, and while a cook cooks, an interesting person interests. Thus, you have to be pursuing interests to be interesting.
The opposite of pursuing and exploring interests, which extend from you out into the world, is consuming. Being fed the world’s unending perspectives fills your brain up with stuff, but does nothing personal with the information.
It’s not yours, really. It’s everyone else’s, all stacked up on top of each other. You never develop your own lens to view the world when you exist only through the perspectives of others.
Endless consumption is letting waves whisk you away by chance, instead of consciously swimming to where you want to be. You failed to learn how to read the currents, feel the temperature, and remember the way home, so now you are lost and drifting along someone else’s route. Consumption of information only becomes an interest when you layer your own existence on top of it. Before that, it’s just a box full of other people’s stuff.
1000 TikToks and 400 YouTube channels will overpower any intrinsic you-ness with a flood of external information, and if it doesn’t lead to any action, you’ve done nothing but lost the plot of yourself with an unending swarm of other people’s opinions. The most you can hope for is to parrot some lump summary of everyone else’s thoughts and pretend they are yours until eventually, they will be. Give other people enough time to mold your clay and the sculpture ends up looking nothing like you.
Do you really like gardening? Or do you kind of like the way gardening was presented to you, curated to drive algorithmic addiction, but can’t really say why? Have you ever done more than the basics of buying a pre-potted plant, naming it, and trying to remember to water it?
Have you explored what that plant is compared to others, it’s structure and native region, maybe even trying to understand what it’s home soil might have consisted of? Have you reflected on why that plant calls to you above all of the other options? Have you found yourself in a plant and the act of taking care of it?
If you’ve done the former, but never even gotten to the edges of the latter, I would be confident in saying that your gardening experience is not interesting. It is everyone else’s experience, lumped up together and projected onto your own life, and you barely even know why you did it in the first place. You can’t even name what calls you to action in your life, so how well can you be certain that you know yourself at all? Why are you letting others define your interests, or even suggest them? How can anyone ever hope to know you if you don’t even know yourself?
Too many people begin to explore hobbies and think ‘I should take up what my friends do, or what I see on IG, that looks cool enough’. This is a betrayal to the self.
Being a pickleball/watch/cars/birdwatching or whatever other permutation of current trend interest means emulating someone else’s projection to try to capture their sense of being interesting, completely bypassing your own. Don’t scan a list of Top 100 Hobbies and pick whatever is easiest to fit into your life, start by asking yourself what you have routinely enjoyed throughout your life and what all of those threads have in common.
Walking through your life, what do you notice about the activities you enjoyed and what they shared? Were there many complex factors involved? Did they happen outdoors? Were they slow and methodical or fast and reactionary? Were other people involved? Did you have to decide between various tools using a systematic approach? Did you construct your own tool to use? Was it best done competitively? Was it used as a status signal to other people outside of the activity? Did you feel differently about yourself during the activity? Is it reliant on any external parties or organizations or global factors? What was the reward system like and is enough to sustain you? Were you happier during it or just closer to what you’re projecting happiness to be?
Start to ask a billion questions about yourself and begin to know yourself.
For me, I like systems. I like starting with bare-bones nothingness or untamed chaos and getting deep into the framework of the parts that I can affect, learning how to asserts my will into the environment. I also need it to be tangible, as so much of my life is online and I ached for non-digital pursuits. I enjoy global games of rarity, where some things are better than others, but that I could decide the reasons for. I learned that because I liked how I could personally decide which types of art were better than other peoples, but I didn’t want it dependent on another human, I wanted it to be in a vacuum. I also wanted it to be completely open, so that I could move in any direction that I wanted to, as I wanted to build without constraints.
Factoring in these criteria and many others, I landed on gemstones and small metalworking as my interest. Through that choice, I learned quite a bit about myself, and now each new learning is tied to my deepest personal qualia.
Do not be a Pickleball Guy just to be a Pickleball Guy.
Be a Pickleball Guy because it is the culmination of an introspective process that calls deeply to your humanity after careful reflection and measurement. Or be whatever other kind of person fits you best, but play the goddamn active role in the decision-making process.
To have interests is to pursue understanding, to interact with the world in juxtaposition with your own humanity. Everything you do for fun, you do as a means of exploring yourself. We seek out novelty, differences, and parallels in universal systems, so that we can encompass them and draw lines back to our human existence. You find yourself through play, and hobbies and interests are just adult play. When you find yourself, you can connect that self to other people, genuinely.
Geologists may not often wonder what it is like to be a rock, but they do wonder about geometry, geography, crystallization patterns, rarity, indicators, history, and more. Those geologists seem to have little in common with those who do digital marketing, until they touch on the geometry of a page layout, the geography of global trends, the crystallization patterns of a concept, the rarity of a product, the indicators of engagement, or the history of advertising.
“Your thing is like my thing” they say to each other.
This is the greatest part of being interesting: you become a prism that others may shine through. By exploring genuine interests and learning about themselves in the process, people can genuinely connect.
By knowing your interest well enough to categorize and draw boxes around concepts, you give others conceptual ropes to swing from. Through your knowledge, they connect observations in their own field to your observations in yours. They absorb a piece of your world and your perspective of your world, making their lives richer in the process. You owe it to the world to be interesting. To produce more than you consume.
If you want connection, you must become someone worth connecting with. No one else will do that for you, and no one owes you their time without it. Endless consumption is passing time, but it is not living and you are not developing. Take in only the information that you can make use of, then do something with it.
Take the time, make the effort, look inward, and become interesting.
With love, from me to you,
Deacon
Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.