Order: Activeness and Passiveness; Niche (2) November 3, 2024
My friends and I found ourselves engaged in a discussion that seems deceptively simple: Do we become skilled at something because we enjoy it, or do we enjoy it because we've mastered it?
This question shows our quintessentially human quest to understand the origins of our own nature of why certain activities ignite our passion while others merely consume our time.
After considerable thinking on this, I've come to believe that both pathways exist simultaneously, reinforcing each other in a perpetual dance. Imagine a guitarist who practices diligently. She experiences the quiet satisfaction of improvement, which fuels her passion, which drives further practice, creating an ascending spiral of skill and joy. Similarly, the natural athlete who discovers an early talent finds pleasure in movement, laying the foundation upon which dedication and eventual mastery can flourish.
Which causal pathway we perceive as dominant likely depends on which patterns we've witnessed more frequently in our own experience. Our selective attention, colored by previous beliefs, only focuses on certain connections while obscuring others. The narratives we construct about skill development become self-fulfilling prophecies, invisible architects of our perceptions.
But this single question only scratches the surface of a deeper philosophical topic. Throughout our lives, we encounter these circular causalities that resist simple linear explanations. Each cause creates effects that themselves become causes, forming nested patterns of influence that stretch backward and forward through time. When we oversimplify these relationships, we risk to misattribute cause and effect, like trying to comprehend an entire symphony from a few isolated notes. Such misunderstandings cascade through our thinking, creating distortions that amplify with each step.
The sequence we assign to these relationships, which came first, or which matters more, often reveals more about our perspective than any objective reality. Some of us instinctively search for initial causes, believing those origins determine outcomes. Others focus on practical results, caring nothing more about present utility. We actively seek information that confirms our existing views, filtering reality through lenses we created. Meanwhile, we passively absorb countless other details without conscious awareness, creating an undercurrent of influence beneath the visible surface of our deliberate attention.
Can we truly trust our own consciousness, the remarkable apparatus that perceives and interprets at the same time? Each person navigates the world with a unique constellation of preferences, biases, and blind spots. We naturally lean toward information that aligns with our worldview, unconsciously avoiding cognitive dissonance like plants turning toward sunlight.
Even when we encounter new information openly, we inevitably misinterpret some portion through the prism of prior understanding. Like the ancient parable of the Tower of Babel, something essential is always lost in transmission. With each retelling, each translation from experience to language to memory to expression, the original meaning gradually transforms, similar to a game of telephone where the first and final messages share only a passing resemblance.
This natural distortion explains why humanity distributes itself across the ideological spectrum. Some rush toward novelty and revolution, while others preserve tradition and stability. Between these poles lies every possible combination of progressive and conservative impulses, creating the rich tapestry of human perspective. This natural distribution forms what we recognize, in certain contexts, as mainstream and niche viewpoints—themselves constantly shifting as yesterday's radical ideas become tomorrow's conventional wisdom.
As these perspectives become entwined with identity, notions of "correctness" and "incorrectness" thinking solidify around them. People don't just hold ideas; they become defined by them. The fascinating irony is that dogmatic insistence on correctness often becomes its own form of incorrectness, as intellectual rigidity spawns even more debates about what's right.
Eventually, these conflicts stop being about ideas and transform into battles of identity. People become so invested in their positions that the original question—whether it warranted such intense discussion—fades from our attention. What remains is merely an intensifying discussion about "correctness." Whether something is mainstream or niche, or whether the question itself truly deserves such debate, becomes a matter of little concern by this point.
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