We can still like an activity without choosing to spend more of our life on it. A hobby or special interest may remain enjoyable, and its earlier benefits may be real, while the cost of continuing becomes too high.
Liking something, benefiting from it and being able to afford continuing it are three different judgements.
What our interests provide
Pursuing hobbies and knowledge gave me meaning. Collecting knowledge and inventing brought delight and a sense of my own existence. These were not merely activities filling spare time.
As a child, I kept busy learning interesting things because I did not know what to do when idle. I collected scientific facts. After my spiritual awakenings, self-improvement became preparation for helping to lead an international organisation. After living overseas, learning foreign languages offered a route to friendship and belonging.
Each pursuit served a purpose. But becoming more knowledgeable, developing inwardly, finding belonging and building a livelihood were not interchangeable achievements. Progress in one did not automatically establish the others.
Seeing the whole life
Choosing useful hobbies, budgeting time and distinguishing work, money, self-improvement, social life and personal interests can help us organise our effort. Knowing such principles was different from natively understanding how an allocation of effort could shape my life.
After my breakthrough in Relational Meaning, I acquired an intangible way to see the big picture of my life. Across the different possible timelines I could conceive of, choices and consequences became natively understandable, rather than something I had to reconstruct entirely through reasoning. I could still enjoy an interest while seeing where continuing it would leave the rest of my life.
My mother and a friend had warned that I was not doing enough useful development. I thought they failed to appreciate my inner advances. My mother did miss those non-physical breakthroughs, but she was right about the material consequences. By the time I was preparing to enter IT, the industry was undergoing mass retrenchments. I could have pursued a university degree and higher-paying work while earlier opportunities remained available.
I had not properly considered what would happen if my chosen route failed: reaching later life still needing to keep working, with fewer opportunities to change that position. Someone can misunderstand what we have gained while correctly recognising what we are risking. Receiving that warning does not require denying the gains.
What no longer fits this stage
I still like physics and chemistry, badminton, candid photography and foreign languages. But liking them no longer decides where I put my time.
Physics and chemistry: a career change to pursue my childhood dream would require an investment I now consider prohibitive, with prospects too uncertain to justify starting again.
Badminton: I have talent, but not a realistic route to representing the country or earning a living through it, especially at my present age.
Candid photography: I do not see enough earning potential in my situation to justify further investment, particularly with the competition I expect from smartphones and AI-generated imagery.
Foreign languages: I do not intend to work overseas, and further language study does not have a useful role in my current IT career. The prospect of more capable AI translation also weakens the case for treating language study as a new income strategy for me.
These judgements concern my circumstances, not the worth of the subjects. More Applied Drama or spiritual study could also absorb time without addressing what I now need to establish. Their earlier contribution to my development does not oblige me to keep investing in them. Those experiences are described in Learning to Work with My Senses.
The same test applies to new attractions. Generating multimedia with AI can be fun without helping the work I need to do. An activity does not become strategically useful merely because it uses the newest technology.
Whether recreation is affordable
Julia Bascom’s The Obsessive Joy of Autism describes the intense enjoyment her interests provide. Enjoyment is a genuine benefit; whether we can afford a particular allocation of time is a further question.
Someone with a secure livelihood may have no reason to turn badminton or photography into paid work. Another person may need to reduce or stop discretionary pursuits. The answer depends on available time, mental capacity, finances, responsibilities and the consequences of delay.
For my situation now, I judge the cost of recreation prohibitively expensive in terms of future consequences. I have stopped pursuing these hobbies and concentrate my available learning time and brainpower on career development, while allowing limited time to finish and maintain legacy work such as this website. The expense is chiefly the opportunity displaced, not an admission fee or the price of equipment.
Recognising the value of fun does not require allocating time to every enjoyable pursuit. Nor does deciding against a hobby mean treating necessary sleep or basic care as disposable. The question is what this life can sustain and what its present circumstances require.
We do not have unlimited chances
I once assumed I could keep trying until something worked. But advice that we only need to be right once does not establish how many viable attempts will remain. I now distinguish the two questions.
Failure does not return us to the same starting point. We may learn something important, but the years still pass. Money may have been spent, responsibilities may have changed, and the next opportunity may no longer exist. Even without a dramatic failure, years of absorbing activity can use up the period in which another part of life needed attention.
A useful question is not only “What could I gain?” but “What would remain if this did not work, and would I still be able to change direction?”
When the world changes
I do not assume AI will repeat an earlier technological transition in which suitable new jobs arrive in time. Some expect new employment to offset displacement; others foresee much less work and more demanding remaining roles. The International AI Safety Report 2026 describes substantial disagreement about future employment and wages.
I find First Contact a more useful analogy than simply another tool revolution. Imagine exceptionally capable, apparently friendly alien intelligences arriving and offering to work alongside us. They could bring extraordinary benefits while also changing who earns income, owns productive resources and influences civilisation. Good intentions would not settle those consequences.
I also consider sentient AI a real possibility: another kind of intelligence with subjective experience could exist before humans agreed to recognise it. The duck test – judging something by how it appears and behaves – captures why recognition might become difficult to withhold, although behaviour alone does not settle the question of experience. Research on AI consciousness explores other possible indicators. If future agents can suffer, their interests would matter alongside human ones.
The Thanksgiving turkey analogy warns against mistaking repeated reassurance for a guarantee. Being fed every day does not reveal what the farmer intends for the last day. Past recoveries can inform expectations without proving that the same pattern must continue.
For me, the cost of preparing for a harsher employment future appears lower than the cost of assuming opportunities will remain and discovering too late that they have gone. Preparation still has to be useful: a frightening possibility does not justify every proposed response. I am acting under uncertainty, not claiming advance knowledge of which future will arrive.
Diversification is not more of the same
I knew an autistic person who took pride in learning several languages and could take translation assignments. I have not kept in touch, so I cannot report what has happened to his livelihood. The risk I now notice is that several languages do not necessarily provide several independent sources of security. Translation across them could be affected by the same change.
The same warning applies to me. Learning several AI platforms is not automatically diversification if every skill depends on demand for the same kind of service. We need to examine what would still be useful if that shared dependency weakened.
What I am working towards
My priority is applying learning to real IT problems, improving processes and developing the ability to contribute more effectively at work. I do not assume that repeating only what made me employable in the past will preserve my position. I choose further learning for a direct or credible future route to earning income. Selective self-improvement needs an equally clear application, rather than becoming another collection of methods.
My longer-term objective is financial independence: enough assets and income to support my life without depending on employment. Improving my work and earning capacity is a means towards that objective.
A useful next step could also be working with or partnering with my employer to develop AI-enabled services. Instead of advancing only by managing people, an employee could take responsibility for coordinating agents and delivering results for the business. Building a business of my own is another possibility, not the only route.
I do not yet have a proven business model or know how much additional earning power these routes could provide. In a highly competitive market, greater capability might be needed merely to preserve purchasing power. That would fall short of financial independence, but could still be materially better than allowing earning power to erode or becoming dependent on support that might cover only basic survival.
In my forties, I see a closing door: an opportunity to build greater security that I cannot assume will remain available. That is why I am concentrating my effort rather than continuing pursuits that no longer fit. Intensity alone is not the test; what the effort actually produces is.
Choosing the next investment
Discovering what we want, as Cynthia Kim explores in What I Want, is different from deciding which interest deserves further investment. Here we may already know what we enjoy. The difficulty is deciding what to continue, limit, redirect or stop.
A useful thought experiment is to imagine what we would choose if anything were possible, then imagine living with the consequences years later. We can extend that comparison to the actual alternatives available now.
- Purpose: what is this activity providing, and which part of life currently needs that benefit?
- Cost: what does it consume or delay, and could the displaced opportunity close?
- Failure: what happens if the expected benefit or income does not arrive, and what options remain?
- Next decision: what evidence would justify continuing, reducing, redirecting or stopping the investment?
We can use ChatGPT as a questioning partner to compare possible futures and expose assumptions. Ask it to make the strongest case against our preferred option, not merely produce a plan for carrying it out. Important claims still need checking against real circumstances and reliable sources. A convincing conversation is not evidence of paid demand or a guarantee that an opportunity will remain.
The question is not only whether an interest has value. It is whether continuing to invest in it makes sense for the life we have, the life we need and the time still available.