Quiet Frontier

Why You Stopped Caring About the Things You Once Loved

Video (16:29): What happens when the things you once loved slowly disappear beneath work, responsibility, productivity, and the pressure to be useful? In this video, I explore why old passions fade, how our identities become shaped around usefulness, and how we can begin reconnecting with the interests that once made us feel alive.

Chapters

Transcript

00:00:00 When I was younger music wasn’t just something I listened to it was where I lived I remember

00:00:16 sitting at the piano for hours not because I had a show coming up and because sir because

00:00:23 I wanted to impress anyone but just because I could there were no audiences

00:00:29 there were no likes there were no comments no streams just the sensation of

00:00:37 the keys and the way a certain chord could make the entire room feel heavy

00:00:42 with emotion it was pure unadulterated joy as I got older that

00:00:52 passion kind of changed like a lot of things it became well useful it turned

00:00:59 into a job for a few years I was making decent money playing with bands doing

00:01:06 solo work it had value but eventually the gravity of life just began to pull on me

00:01:15 bills responsibilities the need for a day job that didn’t depend

00:01:22 on the whims of a gig economy it all piled up music started to move from the

00:01:31 center of my world to the periphery and then one day I realized it was on the

00:01:38 back burner entirely I’ve spent a lot of recent years feeling like there’s this

00:01:47 hollow space inside of me like I’m running this really efficient machine but the

00:01:54 machine is empty and I was thinking about this the other day what if the useful

00:02:01 persona we’ve worked so hard to build the one that knows how to navigate through the

00:02:08 day is actually a high-end prison for our true selves we’re taught to trade our

00:02:18 deepest curiosities for professional stability and we prune away anything that

00:02:26 doesn’t contribute to our personal brand or our productivity but as we become

00:02:33 more optimized we often start to feel like we’re less alive today I want to talk

00:02:41 about how we can stop performing this efficient script and start excavating our

00:02:47 buried interests to find something much more profound and real authentic

00:02:54 resonance we live in a world of hyper optimization from the moment we

00:03:03 enter the workforce we’re encouraged to view ourselves as products that need

00:03:10 constant upgrading we develop this professional crust I guess you could call

00:03:16 it it’s a protective layer made of titles and skills and polished

00:03:22 communication and don’t get me wrong it serves a purpose this persona is what gets

00:03:30 you the promotion it’s what makes you reliable in a crisis but there’s a cost to

00:03:38 building this armor to make ourselves marketable we often perform sort of

00:03:44 systematic pruning we look at our interests say an obsession with how gears

00:03:51 interact or maybe a fascination with the way moss grows on stones and we label

00:03:58 these things as useless they don’t contribute to the return on investment of our

00:04:04 lives so we bury them the danger is that this crust eventually becomes so thick that

00:04:14 we can’t feel the world beneath it anymore we become excellent at performing our

00:04:20 roles you might be great at being a manager or a developer or an analyst you’re

00:04:28 executing your script with precision and efficiency but if you look closely at

00:04:35 your achievements they can feel strangely hollow kind of want to challenge you here

00:04:44 look past your current title strip away your LinkedIn headline and your

00:04:51 responsibilities for a minute are you actually living a life of substance or are

00:04:59 you just performing an incredibly well rehearsed highly efficient script if your

00:05:08 entire identity is built on utility then where the utility ends what’s left of you

00:05:16 so how do we find what we’ve lost we can’t just think positive to find our way back to passion we need some

00:05:29 kind of methodology and I call this personal archaeology we have to treat ourselves like a dig site

00:05:37 you aren’t looking for something new you’re looking for something that was already there buried under all the weight of social

00:05:50 expectations and the pressure to be productive and the first step in this is map your timeline try to identify that moment when certain interests started to fade

00:06:05 when did playing turn into practicing when did curiosity turn into studying for some

00:06:15 credential looking for these inflection points where you decided that an interest

00:06:22 wasn’t worth your time but more importantly look for what I called phantom limbs of

00:06:30 interest a phantom limb is really just a residual sensation of some interest that no longer has a home

00:06:40 it’s that sudden inexplicable urge to take something apart just to see how it works

00:06:48 it’s the way your brain perks up when you hear a specific rhythm pulse in a song even if you haven’t picked up an instrument in a decade

00:06:59 it’s a visceral reaction to a texture to some form of logic or to some narrative style that feels kind of familiar

00:07:12 these aren’t random distractions they’re echoes they’re the traces of your true fascinations trying to signal through that crust

00:07:26 if you feel a sudden useless pull towards something don’t dismiss it as a distraction from work

00:07:36 investigate it that’s where the gold is buried

00:07:40 to do this effectively we have to distinguish between two very different types of interest

00:07:51 first there there are for lack of better way of putting it adult interests these are the ones that are driven by trends by aesthetics or by social capital

00:08:04 this is the person who starts a pottery class because it’s a popular aesthetic on instagram or they join a running club because everyone else is doing it

00:08:15 there’s nothing wrong with this that kind of stuff can be fun but they’re often superficial they’re additive they’re not transformative

00:08:27 and then there’s the raw fascinations these are those primal impulses that defined your early play as a kid

00:08:37 they aren’t driven by what looks good they’re driven by some fundamental almost a biological pull toward a certain type of fascination or a certain type of beauty

00:08:53 it might be the mechanical logic of building with blocks or maybe the way you could lose yourself in creating elaborate invisible worlds

00:09:05 these drives are chemically potent they tap into a deep-seated neural pathway that was formed when your brain was a lot more plastic

00:09:17 decades later these pathways are still there and they’re just waiting for a spark

00:09:25 we’re actually seeing a macro shift in this right now if you look at the cultural trends

00:09:35 there’s a massive movement towards slow tech and physical crafts as well woodworking gardening analog photography

00:09:45 and even coding on much simpler interfaces than the modern world offers it’s not just a trend though it’s really a subconscious collective attempt to reconnect with our roots

00:10:03 we’re collectively trying to break through that digital crust to find something that’s real again now I want to be really clear

00:10:14 this isn’t a call to quit your job and to move to a cabin in the woods

00:10:19 unless you know of course that’s actually what your phantom limb is telling you to do

00:10:25 but make sure you can afford it the goal isn’t necessarily to abandon your professional identity

00:10:33 but it’s to infuse it with these recovered drives we don’t need to start over we need to integrate

00:10:42 we want to move from hollow utility to authentic resonance

00:10:47 I mean think about how a mechanical obsession the childhood urge to see how things fit together

00:10:56 can be brought into some stale management role that you might be in

00:11:01 instead of just managing people as resources

00:11:05 you start seeing them as important parts of some much bigger system

00:11:12 you become an innovator in systems design because you’ve applied your primal fascination with mechanics to human structures

00:11:24 when you start to weave these primitive drives into your high level professional framework

00:11:32 the nature of the work changes

00:11:35 it starts to feel like a less like a series of outputs or tasks to be completed

00:11:43 instead it starts to feel like an expression of who you really are

00:11:49 that’s authentic resonance

00:11:52 the work still requires effort and utility

00:11:56 but it no longer feels like it’s draining your battery continuously

00:12:01 it starts to recharge it

00:12:04 as we move further and further into this era that’s dominated by artificial intelligence and automated efficiency

00:12:13 the value of pure utility is really going down

00:12:18 if a machine can execute a script more efficiently than you

00:12:22 then being a person who simply executes scripts

00:12:27 it’s kind of a losing game

00:12:30 the primary competitive advantage in the future

00:12:34 isn’t going to be how well you can perform a predefined task

00:12:38 it’s going to be your ability to bring human depth creativity

00:12:44 and an authentic perspective to the table

00:12:47 your useless childhood fascinations

00:12:52 your unique way of seeing patterns

00:12:55 or your specific sense of rhythm

00:12:58 are exactly what can’t be automated

00:13:01 success shouldn’t be defined by how much we can optimize our output

00:13:08 but really by how synchronized our inner world

00:13:12 and our adult persona have become

00:13:15 success is when you work

00:13:18 your work is no longer a mask you wear

00:13:23 but it’s an extension of the person who you are

00:13:27 so here’s my challenge for you for this week

00:13:30 find one forgotten drive

00:13:34 don’t try to turn it into a career

00:13:36 don’t try to make it productive

00:13:39 just touch it

00:13:41 read a book on that weird topic that you loved when you were 10 years old

00:13:47 buy the kit to build that small model

00:13:51 listen to that genre of music that you love

00:13:55 listen to it again

00:13:57 see how it affects your mental energy

00:14:00 see if just for a moment

00:14:03 you can feel that crust start to thin

00:14:07 there’s a young man lighting up the fire tonight

00:14:22 there’s a young man lighting up the fire tonight

00:14:29 doing his best

00:14:33 to make things right in his mind

00:14:39 there’s a young girl in on the tracks tonight

00:14:51 trying to douse the light that keeps her up

00:14:57 but she has no luck

00:15:00 there’s a siren screaming somewhere outside

00:15:09 learn the lesson

00:15:15 you can run

00:15:16 you can run

00:15:17 but you can’t hide

00:15:19 for very long

00:15:27 there’s a church bell tolling out the time

00:15:31 you can run

00:15:35 sounds just like

00:15:37 some ancient crime

00:15:39 that’s long forgotten

00:15:41 the sun sets on your evil and your good

00:15:52 good

00:15:55 you try to do what’s right

00:15:58 try to do what you should

00:16:01 to get on by

00:16:04 be careful of the dangers

00:16:09 when you give your soul to strangers

00:16:13 i’m going home

00:16:15 to cindy’s arms tonight