Ideally, you’d align the two, but sometimes you must go it alone.
Finding the things we are interested in is one of life’s main goals and provides us with meaning, joy and a sense of belonging. However, we can sometimes be interested in things that very few people are or things that people in your family and friendship circles don’t find as interesting as you. This is not uncommon, but you can still show general support to someone even if you are not interested specifically in what they are doing.
The advancement in technologies have made finding like-minded people online easier where finding people in reality is difficult. Still, nothing beats sitting down face-to-face with people and having a real heart-to-heart about something you’re passionately interested in.
When pursuing something of little or no interest to other people around you, it is also not uncommon to have feelings of “is it me? where am I going wrong?”, and this is a great point to interject the conversation of individuality vs conformity. Cultivating our individual character is one of the most important things we can do, but whilst being authentic can isolate you from the crowd it generally tends to encourage the right sort of people. Doing too much for the interests of other people can become problematic and breed resentment.
You may find yourself saying, “why is no one interested?”, and the answer is, that is not really true. It’s one of those half-truths you tell yourself when you are a bit fed up or tired or lacking motivation (I wrote a previous piece on motivation here which may be of some interest). The truth is, sometimes we don’t know what is going to be of interest to other people and there are billions and billions of things vying for our attention. We must learn to take a leap of faith, just not like Ezio into a bale of hay.
So, you re-shape the question into “how do I engage others?” in what I am are interested in. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, your potential audience is no longer limited to your local physical community (obviously, there are pros and cons to this, but that is not the point am I making here). Part of how you engage others depends on your level of extraversion, and the way society is currently constructed it is setup to benefit extraverted people. This is a disadvantage to introverted people like myself, but it’s still not impossible to succeed.
As a writer, especially if you want to make a career of it, you have to learn to balance writing what you want and writing what others want (I expanded on this in another article here) and as I said in the opening line, ideally align the two interests.
As long as you can find one person to have in your corner, you’ll be alright, even if that means going it alone for a period of time.
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