What’s Your Passion?

When I first meet a new person, I like to quickly delve deep into a topic. I honestly could care less what we talk about because I find myself fascinated by the passions of others. If someone is extremely passionate about a specific topic, there is nothing I love more than to listen to them gush on about it.

Through these conversations I learn a lot about a variety of topics. Sometimes I wonder where exactly this knowledge ends up going, or if it is even useful in the first place, but regardless believe that knowledge is beneficial for the sake of it.

But when people ask me about my passion, it’s hard to articulte it clearly. I am interested in so many different topics. I believe they’re all connected in a massive and intertwining web. It’s hard to choose only one thing when so much is interesting to me!

I struggled in college because of this. I couldn’t choose only one topic to study because I truly wanted to study them all. I believe that there is no one degree that stands out more than others. They’re all important to learn and understand for different reasons.

My mind automatically jumps to the bigger picture. I ask myself how each topic relates to larger systems that structure our society. I analyze how fields of study impact our very existence on this planet. I try to connect the dots between ideas that don’t have clear or obvious connections.

Is there one degree that does it all? I don’t think so. Fortunately I ended up in a program that at least allowed me to study topics of engineering, art, and science more broadly. But, with breadth, it’s not always possible to delve deeply enough into the topic to draw any real or important conclusions.

I suppose four years isn’t enough time to understand as much as I would like to, but you have to start somewhere.

I just wish that our world valued variety over specialization. I wish that variety was the norm, with specialization being on the backburner, instead of the other way around. But I guess it’s true that specialization is valuable especially in fields such as medicine and very high level sciences.

That being said, I still think that specialization puts people into silos and prevents innovation and creative thinking. It forces people to work in one job and depend on a very specific career for security. If that job becomes unavailable for whatever reason, one’s options are extremely limited if they want to find another career.

In our formal education system, we perpetuate this type of thinking by spliting up math, science, history, etc. into their own classes and categories. After math class is over, and we go to our history class, we don’t think about how math and history overlap. We see them as completely different topics. But, in doing so we limit ourselves.

My favorite period in history was the Renaissance. It produced brillant thinkers and artisans such as Leonardo da Vinci, who contributed to science, engineering, and art in unique ways. His mind challenged the world so much so that hundreds of years later, he is still one of the most intelligent people to have ever existed.

For as long as I can remember, di Vinci has fascinated me. I admire his mind and spirit. I truly think that without him, our world would be fundamentally different.

But, unfortunately, the Industrial Revolution happened and this way of thinking, as well as creativity in general, has become devalued. We structured our education system in such a way that produces employees for industry, not for creativity.

Of course, we see creative projects in entrepreneurship and other artistic fields, but these are both abnormalities. Creativity is only valued because it is rare. But, just imagine how different our world would be if another revolution happened that put creativity at the forefront. What new discoveries would we, as a species, uncover? How would our world be different?

Maybe I don’t have one passion. Or maybe my passion is life. I think regardless of whether you think the same way that I do or if you value specialization, it’s important to care about something. It’s important to be able to gush on about at least one of the millions of different topics one could explore. Even though creativity is not at the forefront of our civilization, we only move forward because of those who are crazy enough to follow their dreams. What’s yours?