My friends and I were spending time together earlier today, and I was explaining a festival that exists in Northern California to celebrate the spring and the blossom of the mustard in the fields. Mostly it is a festival for already rich people to make tons off of really rich people who secretly want to be cultured and think they know something about wine. Go on basking in your hippie rich vacuum nor cal one of these days reality really will come knocking; it’ll probably be your children that get effected when they don’t know how to find a job.
Anyway I was telling my friends about this festival and they were giving me their deflection faces (basically ignoring me, but from time to time dropping a word or two). I have a feeling close friends do this to other people who try to hang out with them but obviously aren’t on their level as friends. Also people who are really weird get this done to them a lot, i.e. Beloit College Students. My friends shifted into their own conversation and I walked off mid-sentence. A moment or two passed and I heard one of them shout from the other room, “Sorry Lincoln!”
When I came back I told them that I was chill, and that they didn’t have to be sorry. Fortunately, for my own self-happiness I knew when people weren’t interested in what I had to say and I could walk off and be fine with it.
Topically this just looks like normal interactions but if one were to dig deeper there are some underlining economic principals and a little chicken-and-the-egg action as well.
From a theoretical economic approach (and believe me when I tell you this, I know of no literature relating to this subject) what comes first interest or self-benefit? I would have said that interest is based on self-benefit. Are people interested in things because they get benefit from them? If so, from a purely utilitarian perspective much of academia should not exist. What fuels interest? Why are we tickled by some topics while that same topic might seem as boring as shit to another individual? For example, environmentalism and economics. I’m interested in environmentalism and most sociology topics make me want to stick a pencil in my eye I get so bored, even the ones that relate to environmentalism. Why is that?
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2 comments:
Ha! This is something that I consider all the time! I have friends that love math and physics and the like, where as I am a humanities nut. While those things interest me, I would never in my life want to study them.
Interest, I would say, comes from previous experiences, and the social and cultural situation that you are brought up in. We all come from different backgrounds with different experiences, which are reflected in our interests. We view the world differently too, looking for our own ways to make sense of the world and to fit into it. I think students have interests in environmentalism and economy, or religion and anthropology, because (for their self benefit) it makes sense to them as a model for how the world works.
yea, it gets pretty harry though. There could be so many factors that shed light on what is the cause of our satisfaction. I just want to get at a deeper curiosity which is to say, How the heck can someone be interested in something I find so boring? I know that they are, but why? I agree with you though, it does make sense that personal history would play a large role in determining interest. But not to beat a dead horse but some people just hate asparagus, previous experience doesn't play into that. It is almost that "interest" could be an unmotivated factor (some guys just like baseball, and we can't explain that) or interest is motivated by of self-benefit. But this still doesn't explain the benefit of a "hobby." something for which there is no monetary benefit but people do anyway. why do some people like model trains and others are literally dripping with tears they're bored so much. like me, model trains kind of bore me.
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