Comment by ai-christianson
2 months ago
Having a hobby kind of like going shallow into one or more topics.
Wouldn't the best way to spend a life be to go all in on one thing?
It's not like a video game where we can just try again. If the main quest isn't right, better find a new one, not just add distracting side quests.
Dealers choice.
The world is too interesting for me to be happy to limit myself to one thing.
Additionally, I listen to a wide variety of music, read not a very wide variety of books (mainly hard sci-fi), consider myself a connoisseur of film and television, take an interest in at least two other sports (have season tickets to the local teams games), run a slightly more than simple homelab (in a room I built myself in the shed, complete with backup battery power and rudimentary climate control), including hosting my own email server, amongst other parental and husbandly duties.
One of the reasons I'm awake at 3am on Christmas Day.
Everything is interesting. Limiting oneself to one thing is exceedingly boring.
Disclaimer: personal opinion. I see and live off the benefits to the world provided by the single minded. But I'll never pretend I could live like that.
[dead]
its really possible to top out on some of these things. once you're at the point where you're like 'I could try to do this professionally, but that would ruin the fun of it and its a really tough market'
plus, dont forget about the substantial benefits from cross-training
if you find something thats really your thing, thats great, but the goal is to interest and engage yourself. why is it that important to demand the time to to eek out that last 5%
its also possible to actually blow through a field. the scope of coding projects I can just spit out as rote are well past what anyone is willing to adopt. what would be the point of training any further. there's really a lot more to learn about machining.
> Wouldn't the best way to spend a life be to go all in on one thing?
no
It’s entirely possible to spread yourself too thin across too many interests, but the solution to that isn’t to “go all in on one thing”.
There's no such thing as going all in on one thing. At some point you know how to find food and eat, so no matter how much you've devoted your time to one thing, it won't be the maximum possible amount of time