For Your Pleasure Only
Can you admit your interests don't matter? (And what if they do?)
I can’t find it now, but I was reading something in Reddit about old video games or electronics (two of my hobbies/interests), and one of the comments was something like, “Remember, all of this stuff will be garbage when you die, or a few decades later. Sometimes I remind myself I’m just doing this for my own pleasure and interest, not because it matters in any way.”
That’s interesting to me. I think about that a lot with regard to collecting old things. As I wrote about here, I had a whole little philosophy of preservation in my head. I had read Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school, then a couple of years later discovered Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers and The Hidden Persuaders (I found the latter in a box at the dump, which seemed rather fitting), then went to college and got to know an environmentalist professor who confirmed my ideas: we spend too much, use too much, waste too much, and might be better off with less, and the planet certainly would.
I had this image of myself as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four keeping that old paperweight, so that some fragment of the pre-Party past could still exist. I saw the preservation of old things as a way to guard against tyranny and cultural amnesia. I suppose it looks like pridefulness or cluelessness now (and it also speaks to how much free time I had back then), but I always just kind of assumed that the things I found interesting were important. I must find them interesting because they’re important, because my judgment is very good.
My default view was the polar opposite of the fellow on Reddit saying that your collections are just trash that you happen to personally like. I always thought something like “This thing is personally interesting to me, therefore it must be cosmically important.” And I guess, on some level, I find it confusing and terrifying to think that my interests are not cosmically important. How can a person feel grounded without thinking that their interests matter?
On the other hand, I wonder where I got this idea. Maybe I treated secular objects like we treat holy objects in my Catholic faith; maybe, when I write about how putting on a record is like a sacrament, or that the old Panasonic cassette changer reminds me of the Eucharist, I’m engaging in heresy.
But I also wonder if my (very secular) small liberal arts college education gave me this idea. You hear so much about “following your passion” and “changing the world.” They’re basically telling you, Whatever you happen to find interesting capital-M Matters. This is certainly idealism—most people never do get to work 9-5 jobs that they’re passionate about. It also privileges the workaholic and the striver over family life; some people aren’t passionate about anything professional; a job is a job, and life outside of work is where you find time for the things that matter.
But worst of all, it probably does cultivate and encourage pridefulness and arrogance. It’s also incoherent; some people’s passions and the change they want to see in the world are at odds; it’s a little like Eisenhower’s “And I don’t care what it is.”1 I wonder how much those four years of being told how important you are and how much the world needs you make real life harder than it has to be, having been promised an idealized and implicitly self-centered professional life.
This might be a bit of a tangent from “Is collecting old video games objectively important?” But all of this has to do with how we should think about things we like, and in what direction the link between personal interest and politics or philosophy or cause goes. For example, am I an urbanist because I like cities? Are “causes” just concealed personal interests? I don’t think so, but this is an intellectual humility that we could probably use more of.
Related Reading:
Sacramentalism and Consumerism
When I Was Wrong: “The Affluence Pandemic”
He almost certainly didn’t actually mean that the way it is typically quoted/used.