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Interest and Balance
I seem to have always been this way.
For a period of time, I suddenly become deeply interested in something. Once that interest appears, it is as if a stream has found an opening. It quickly spills into the rest of my life. I give it enormous amounts of time, thinking about it, practicing it, exploring it, until, gradually, it loses its mystery.
Then, one day, the interest simply recedes.
There is no farewell, no ceremony. I just stop, and move on to something else that catches my attention.
Looking back, this has happened many times.
At the end of 2022, I suddenly became interested in singing.
Whenever I had a little free time, I would open the karaoke app and sing. I sang while walking on weekends, after dinner at the office, before going to bed at night, and even when I was traveling and staying alone in a hotel. Sometimes I sang so late that someone actually complained.
At first, getting an SSSSS rating felt extremely difficult. I thought having ten songs with an SSSSS would already be quite an achievement.
But I kept singing.
More than a year later, I had accumulated more than a hundred songs rated SSSSS.
And then, I stopped singing.
Looking back, perhaps what fascinated me was not really singing itself, but the process of moving from not being able to do something to being able to do it. Something that initially seemed difficult gradually became familiar. The boundary kept moving outward.
And eventually, when something that once seemed almost unreachable became ordinary, the interest quietly disappeared.
Later, I became interested in reading.
At that time, I was based in Thailand. Outside of work, I seemed to do little more than read or sing. Fortunately, I happened to find several books that I genuinely enjoyed, and I kept reading one after another.
There were plenty of books on WeRead, but not nearly as many that I truly wanted to keep reading. Gradually, it became harder to find something that held my attention.
And that interest, too, slowly faded.
Then came market research on Fintech and contact centers in the region where I was working.
This time, something was different.
One day, a question suddenly appeared in my mind. I wanted to understand it.
So I started searching for information, studying cases, looking for data, and thinking.
I researched during the day, continued at night, and kept thinking while walking. Sometimes, at two or three in the morning, my mind was still running.
It was a strange state.
It felt as though I had somehow become one with the writing.
First came the thinking.
A question would appear. I would challenge it, discard it, rebuild it. A conclusion would emerge, only to reveal another question underneath. So I kept going.
And then, sometimes, something would suddenly connect.
Ideas that had been scattered across different places would fall into place, and the words would simply begin to flow.
Tens of thousands of words could come out almost effortlessly.
That was when I realized that a person could actually lose all sense of time because of a question.
This year, there was Universe Crystal.
This time, the interest went even further.
The first stage was research. I kept thinking and gradually built what became the Canonical Baseline. Whenever an idea became clear, I asked ChatGPT to record it. Then I would continue thinking, revising, and developing new concepts.
The second stage was writing a series of articles for Medium.
I suddenly realized that what I had written in the first stage, although meaningful to me, was not necessarily something other people could understand. No one would willingly open a strange book filled with unfamiliar concepts and read it from the first page to the last.
So I began turning those internal thoughts into something that could be shared publicly.
And while I was writing, the research continued.
The third stage was building the Universe Crystal website.
Those two weeks were particularly strange.
Every day brought new progress, and every day revealed another goal. The moment I finished one thing, I would discover another thing that could be done.
When those two weeks were over, it felt as though two years had passed.
In reality, it had only been two weeks.
So much had happened.
The fourth stage was writing academic papers.
In less than two weeks, I wrote five papers. Four philosophical papers were eventually included as preprints on PhilPapers. Two were submitted to international academic journals and are still under review. A few others were desk-rejected soon after submission.
Strangely, I was not particularly disappointed.
Because the thing that excites me has never really been the outcome.
It is the process.
A vague question appears in my mind and gradually becomes clear. An idea becomes a concept. A concept becomes a theory. And the theory becomes an article, a website, or a paper.
Looking back, I seem to have been doing the same thing all along.
Only the questions have changed.
Thinking about this reminds me of something from my school years.
I could often do very well in individual subjects, especially in competitions.
Once I became interested in a problem, I could stay with it for a very long time.
But comprehensive examinations were different.
They required me to deal with many different things within a limited amount of time. Before I had finished thinking through mathematics, I had to switch to language. Just as I entered the rhythm of one problem, I had to move on to another subject.
Looking back, perhaps that was already a glimpse of the person I am today.
I find it easy to give myself completely to one question.
I am less naturally inclined to divide myself among many questions at once.
So sometimes I wonder:
What kind of life is this?
I don’t seem to have one clearly defined ultimate goal.
When I was singing, I never thought about where singing would take me. When I was reading, I never wondered what reading would ultimately achieve. When I was doing market research, I simply wanted to understand the question in front of me.
And now, with Universe Crystal, it is much the same.
While many people use AI for entertainment, I find myself using AI to do academic research.
For what?
Sometimes, I don’t really know.
Perhaps simply because I am interested.
A question appears.
I don’t know the answer.
So I want to find out.
That’s all.
But I am beginning to realize that interest itself has weight.
It can carry a person a very long way.
It can also make a person forget the passage of time.
Perhaps what I need to learn is not how to find one interest that never changes, but how to return to ordinary life after becoming completely absorbed in something.
When an interest comes, take it seriously.
When it leaves, let it go.
Just don’t let one interest become your entire life.
Perhaps balance does not mean distributing life perfectly.
Perhaps it simply means remembering, after diving deep, to come back to the surface.
And then—
keep living.
Reviews & Discussion
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