Here’s a thought experiment:
If exposed in equal amounts to every potential interest from
math to scuba diving to knitting, would there be clear
compatibility groupings from which we could create archetypes?
Can interests or passions be categorized in a meaningful,
collectively exhaustive way? If a study was conducted
gathering all the interests and strength of interests for
a big sample, would patterns emerge? Almost certainly yes
but these patterns would be mirror images of our society,
not of our innate potential for passion in specific areas.
The typical person has many interests, some are more
common than others because exposure to them is greater.
In the US most people play high school sports which
provides them with an often lifelong interest, making
sports a likely candidate as an interest. This is an interest
we often have in common with our community, but we also have
our personal interests, derived from the quirks of our parents
or the uncle with the sail boat. The combination of
community and specific personal interests would create an array with
endless combinations. Some intersections would be common
but most would contain few cases of shared composition.
It would also be interesting to look at the data that isn’t
there, which combinations are highly unlikely? Perhaps it is in the odd cases where we find the pure unadultered passion, where we can learn the most.
Oscar Holm 