What are “special interests”?

There are a number of terms for this. For now I prefer “Special Interests.” This phenomenon is generally thought of as an autistic thing. What are they to me? I’ll share my experience here:

• I learn about these topics as much as I possibly can, mostly via my own research
• I enjoy doing or learning about them (probably both)
• I tend to hyperfocus on or get extremely passionate about them
• I may collect, categorize, and organize things related to the topic. This could be data or facts or physical things like dried leaves
• These occupy a lot of my free time. If I’m not doing the thing, I’m learning about it, or infodumping on someone about it
• Engaging with these interests can be profoundly soothing and enjoyable
• If somebody within a mile radius of me mentions one of these topics, I will suddenly appear and begin sharing everything I know about the subject. It’s not a arrogance thing, it’s a “so exciting that somebody is talking about the thing I love and want to know everything about!” thing. It’s difficult for me to notice when people get bored hearing about it
• Worth noting: making a page like this is a perfect example of what I like to do with my interests: organize things in spreadsheets, tables, collections, and text files. Maybe that’s a “meta-special interest”
• Also worth noting: I’m also an ADHDer, so that certainly plays a role here

Here’s a list of mine

thing	current level of enthusiasm (out of 100)	examples	date range
music	100	practicing 6 hours a day, going to music school, becoming a gigging musician, learning multiple instruments, constantly creating new music, learning about new genres and styles, transcribing, composing, etc. etc.	~1994 – now
coding	80	Closely linked to my love of linux. I started learning PHP in ~2011 so I could understand WordPress and other PHP-based software. I wrote a basic web app: a journal. I’ve been using it daily for more than a decade. It’s gone through many iterations as as wellI learned better and more efficient ways to code. I write code all the time, mostly to solve problems or annoyances and to make life a little easier for me. This website is the result of my “special interest” in coding	2011 – now
foraging	60	I learned about every edible plant and mushroom in our part of Michigan, collected them, ate them, brewed beer and kombucha with them. Walk with me in the woods or the fields and I won’t shut up about naming all the plants and describing the best way to cook them. My favorite native wild plant is Sassafras	2012? – now
fishing	30	At my peak in 2012, I fished ~376 times. I made my own lures, tied my own flies, fished everywhere I possibly could, and caught many many fish. When I wasn’t fishing I was reading about fishing.	2010 – 2016ish
linux	90	trying different distros, window managers, text editors, file managers; running servers at home to make my “personal cloud”; learned bash scripting, program compilation, troubleshooting techniques, etc. Learning about and using linux every day directly lead to my current job as a systems administrator.	2009 – now
emacs	90	The best operating system that also has a nice text editor. It’s very old software that does a million things. Emacs is the main way I interact with computers.	2017 – now
personal cloud	85	A natural outgrowth of my linux and coding interests. I run a number of open-source softwares on my servers at home. These services include S3-compatible storage, music library organization and playback, my journal, monitoring and metrics, my websites (including this one), RSS reader, DNS and ad-blocker, web-based Git, my photo and video library, web links, social media (GoToSocial), and many more	2013 – now
art	60	I have always made art, and for a long time I was sure my career would involve visual art. That slightly shifted when I got into music, but art has always been there. I know more about art history than one might expect from a nerdy music dude. I like to make art for fun, and I make all my own album covers (with varying levels of success)	1990 – now
my personal wiki	100	This is where everything I learn gets stored. Everything about all my special interests is funneled into my wiki where I can organize, categorize, cross-reference, and read. I have almost 7,000 documents in my wiki that run the gamut from “how to fillet a trout” to “how to configure the nginx webserver” to “all the different ways you can prepare a dandelion plant” to “the average bacterial makeup of a kombucha scoby” to “interesting things that happened in 1973” to “what is the pinout of a 4071 Quad 2-input OR gate?” to “Everything about the Art Nouveau style from the early 20th century” to “a recipe for roasted cauliflower”. This wiki currently lives inside Emacs	2013 – now

More

If you keep going deeper, within each special interest are even more specific special interests. For instance, within music:

thing	current enthusiasm	examples	date range
dub reggae	100	listening to all dub I can get my hands on. Researching how King Tubby got certain sounds. Transcribing songs. Learning bass specifically so I could play more authentic dub music. Incorporating dub techniques into literally all the music I make	2010 – now
electronic music	100	Even this is a huge area and could be split into many special interests, like building modular synthesizers and learning modular synthesis, learning to code with Pure Data for digital music creation, building microphones, analyzing my favorite tracks to learn them at a visceral level. I love many genres of electronic music, especially techno and electro.	1995 – now
jazz	75	I studied jazz for a very long time. My musical background is thoroughly based in jazz, and while I don’t make jazz music anymore, everything I do is informed by it. When I was younger they all said “practice everything in all 12 keys” so I did. They said “practice as many hours a day as you can” so I did. “Listen to as much jazz and other music as you can” so I did. I don’t know if that was naivety or autism or what, but it has served me well.	1994 – now
learning musical instruments	70	I love learning new instruments and practicing for hours. With varying degrees of competence, I play saxophones, clarinets, flute, keyboards, organ, bass, drums, accordion, and more	1994 – now
sound design	85	Creating sounds. I’ve made thousands and thousands of sounds, from lasers to thumps to machinery running to imagined animals growling and so on. They live in my ever-growing sample library, which as you might imagine, I like to organize	2014 – now