I didn’t choose my interests.
They arrived with me.
Some were visible early. Others lay dormant for decades, only revealing themselves later in life — when experience, loss, and perspective finally gave them room to surface.
That delay matters.
Interests are often mistaken for hobbies or preferences. For me, they are something deeper: recurring ways of seeing. They shape how I move through the world, what I notice, what holds my attention, and what quietly repels me.
They aren’t adopted.
They’re recognised.
Born With, Revealed Over Time
Looking back, the signals were always there.
A pull toward patterns.
A fascination with systems.
An instinct to observe rather than participate blindly.
A need to understand how things actually work — beneath the surface explanation.
As a child, these traits didn’t always have names. They showed up as curiosity, restlessness, or a sense of not quite fitting. Later, they re-emerged with clarity: in history, finance, technology, psychology, travel, and metal detecting.
What changed wasn’t the interest.
It was me.
Experience sharpens perception. Loss removes noise. Time strips away what was never essential. Interests that survive that process are not passing fascinations — they are structural.
Interests as Orientation, Not Identity
I don’t treat interests as badges.
They are not identities to perform, nor tribes to join. They are lenses — ways of orienting myself in a complex world.
Each interest here reflects the same underlying impulse:
- to understand systems
- to detect patterns
- to recognise incentives
- and to remain grounded in reality rather than narrative
That’s why these pages overlap and reinforce one another. History informs finance. Psychology explains markets. Technology amplifies leverage. Travel reveals context. Metal detecting reconnects abstraction to ground.
They are not separate pursuits.
They are expressions of the same temperament.
Why Interests Matter
Interests are often dismissed as optional extras — things you do once life is “sorted”.
I see it the other way around.
Interests are signals pointing toward congruence. When ignored, life becomes brittle. When honoured, it gains coherence.
Many people reach midlife exhausted, confused, or numb — not because they failed, but because they spent decades suppressing what mattered to them in order to fit systems that never truly suited them.
Interests, properly understood, are not indulgences.
They are navigation tools.
A Final Thought
I don’t expect everyone to share these interests.
That isn’t the point.
The point is to live in alignment with what has quietly, consistently mattered — even when it took years to recognise it.
These pages are not a catalogue.
They are a map.