“The Important” vs. “The Interesting”: A Philosophical Look at What We Value
By: A.J. Drenth
Tags: Important, Interesting, Philosophy, Values

I’ve been writing about personality psychology for over a decade, but have recently experienced more tension in my work between what I call “the important” vs. “the interesting.” Namely, I find myself wrestling with whether my writing should always focus on important issues or if I should also be content exploring what is merely interesting. To some of you, this may seem a rather trivial or abstruse concern, but I think this topic has the potential to prove both interesting and important.

To begin, I want to highlight the fact that these two concepts aren’t entirely independent of one another. If we reflect on the interesting — on that which fully captures our attention — we get the sense that, to a certain extent, it’s also important to us. In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi makes the case that deep absorption in an activity is the “optimal” type of human experience. He claims that flow states emerge between the poles of understimulation (i.e., boredom) and overstimulation (i.e., stress / anxiety). To this I would add that feeling “interested” is a noteworthy precursor to flow and thus a contributor to what is optimal and important in human experience.

The reverse can hold true as well. Namely, the things we deem important commonly command our interest. A life-threatening emergency, for instance, undoubtedly passes the importance test and, due to its urgent nature, is sure to grip our attention until the threat has waned.

That said, it’s just as easy to imagine scenarios where ostensibly important tasks fail to capture our interest. Filling out tax forms or studying for a test is certainly important, but such obligatory tasks often prompt procrastination rather than earnest engagement.

The word obligation, much like duty, connotes something that is important but not terribly interesting. When we invest in a job that doesn’t reflect a genuine interest of ours we call it work, or worse, labor. However, even those pursuing their passion are bound to feel disengaged at times and forced to contend with mundane tasks that, if left undone, may undermine their long-term objectives. Personal sacrifices are inevitable when pursuing what’s important to us.

There’s also no shortage of activities which are interesting, but not all that important. Video games, or any game for that matter, might fit this criterion. And if games fall under the broader umbrella of entertainment, our next question might be: Is entertainment merely interesting, or is it also important?

Considering our current global predicament — quarantining in response to the coronavirus pandemic — entertainment is proving to be a lifesaver for many people, keeping them halfway sane in a time that, for some, may feel eerily akin to solitary confinement. Pre-coronavirus, entertainment played a somewhat smaller, though certainly not insignificant role in human life. It’s barely hyperbolic to suggest that we’re married to our smartphones, which at minimum tend to keep us “interested.” But as some of you may be old enough to remember, humans did manage to enjoy life prior to smartphones and it’s debatable whether these devices have actually made us happier.

At minimum, entertainment has a measure of practical importance, even if it largely involves distracting us from our worries and anxieties. If Csikszentmihalyi is correct in asserting that we’re happier when we’re absorbed in something, we can see how entertainment is useful in this respect. But there’s also a voice inside us (although admittedly louder for some than others) that criticizes entertainment as self-indulgent or “a waste of time.”

“Wasting Time”

But what do we mean, exactly, when we talk about wasting time? And what are its origins?

I surmise this notion partly derives from what sociologist Max Weber famously dubbed the “Protestant work ethic,” which is characterized by qualities like hard work, asceticism, and self-discipline. According to Weber, this ethic is foundational to modern capitalism. Through the lens of this ethic, being entertained is perceived as wasteful if that time could be spent working and getting a leg up on one’s competitors.

For some, this work-centric mindset may generally prove satisfying, conferring a sense of both interest and importance. But if they are willing to admit questions like “To what end?” or “What’s the point of it all?” into consciousness, they may start seeing some philosophical cracks in their credo.

Another relevant ethic, that of altruism, might be taken to mean that the best use of free time involves investing in the lives of others. While at first blush this may sound like a perfectly admirable prosocial philosophy, if adding to another’s well-being requires a commensurate subtraction from one’s own, then there’s actually zero net gain, collectively speaking, in well-being. One could just as readily suggest that more value could be created if people simply focused on their own well-being. And if this were to include being entertained, it appears that entertainment might again fit the bill as important.

In sum, our concern about wasting time seems largely related to long-established cultural expectations regarding hard work and caring for others. And in all likelihood the evolutionary roots of these values run deep. If our ancient ancestors were to rest on their laurels for too long, they risked missing opportunities for food and better living conditions. So in a real sense wasted time, especially the mismanagement of critical daylight hours, could have translated to lost lives.

Although we inhabit an entirely different world from that of our hunter-gatherer forebears, much of our psychology, especially that of our “reptilian brain,” has gone largely unmodified. Whether we realize it or not, many of us are still driven by a scarcity mindset, which cautions that letting down our guard for even a moment may put our survival at risk. In modern life, things like a good reputation or work history are at least viscerally perceived as critical to survival, since our physical livelihood has become inextricably linked with our social standing. This further illumines why wasting time is frowned upon. If survival is our first objective, and living comfortably our second, then taking one’s societal roles seriously, which helps ensure those two objectives, is of considerable importance.

That said, we cannot ignore the fact that our social safety net is far more robust than that of our ancestors, so those confident in this fallback may worry less about time wasting. Some have taken this a step further, such as universal basic income (UBI) proponent Andrew Yang, by contending that there are no longer enough good paying jobs to go around and we should therefore start planning for and phasing into a “post-labor” society. For many people, the current quarantine has offered a glimpse of the challenges associated with such a predicament. And I wonder if the overarching concern might not be purposelessness, the sense that there’s nothing particularly urgent or important to do.

A Closer Look at The Important

We’ve already explored how importance relates to work, altruism, and even more fundamentally — to deep-seated survival concerns. But this only scratches the surface. We’ve yet to even mention God or religion, for instance, which lies close to the heart of importance for so many people. But for our purposes here, it’s not so much what we consider important, but the degree of importance, that is most consequential.

One can be just as passionate about climate change, or to take a more outlandish example — hotdogs — as another person is about God. Regardless of which of these things is objectively more important (clearly hotdogs in this case), the subjective sense of importance may be very much the same. Granted, a provocateur philosopher might step in and argue that hotdogs are categorically unimportant. And if successful, our hotdog enthusiast might find himself deeply depressed, realizing that his attributions of importance were grossly misplaced and years of his life misappropriated.

This leads us to our next point which is that perceived importance, irrespective of what it involves, tends to increase with time and investment. Namely, the longer we invest in and identify with something (or someone) — be it a religion, political party, or elsewise — the harder it is to relinquish or entertain alternatives. This reluctance is typically rooted in some combination of pride and fear. Pride keeps us from even considering that our beliefs or values may be offbase, while fear emerges from the imagined consequences of being proven wrong. Fear may also spring from the social or livelihood concerns we touched on earlier, especially if one has been a long-time proponent of certain ideas, products, or practices.

This suggests that there are inherent risks involved with investing oneself in an object of perceived importance. It also explains why choosing a life partner or career path feels so weighty. On the one hand, we crave the sense of importance that such commitments represent, while on the other, we fear the repercussions of making the wrong choice or having a change of heart.

That said, even commitments as consequential as a career are composed of subsets of projects and activities. It may therefore be worth considering the degree to which the imagined importance of a chosen career will trickle down and affect its constituent activities. There appears to be some disagreement, or at least differences of emphasis, on this issue. For instance, some companies spend a lot of time fine-turning their mission statement in hopes of infecting their employees with a sense of importance in their work. An alternative approach to making work meaningful involves the notion that, if we adopt the right attitude and mindset going in, nearly any task or project can be experienced as important or interesting. An example is the philosophy of mindfulness, which suggests that “staying present” is a more reliable path to satisfaction than abstract conceptions about mission or purpose.

I’d now like to revisit an earlier point regarding importance and obligations, namely, that pursuit of the important won’t always be easy or fun. Contrast this with the interesting, which almost always seems pleasurable, but may lack the deeper significance and durability of the important. Many, perhaps most, of our interests are temporary, tapering off after their novelty wanes. Although bordering on tautological, one might even argue that, in order for an interest to persist, it must be anchored in importance. Thus, what begins as an interest in video games or hot dogs must at some point register as important in order to be sustained.

Some people surely find it hard to imagine how video games or hotdogs could, in all seriousness, be construed as important. After all, these things don’t readily align with our culture’s ethic of work or care, which to some extent constrain our ability to appreciate fringe versions of importance. We might, for instance, struggle to see how Johnny’s Mario Kart wizardry is serving the common good. But isn’t Johnny playing the same basic role as someone like Lebron James? Both can be seen as striving for excellence in their chosen field. The only difference is Lebron’s game of choice, basketball, is more deeply engrained in our culture, which means we’re willing to pay him a lot more money and collectively celebrate his achievements.

While there is a place in the world for Mario Kart extraordinaires, this doesn’t mean that we should dispense with notions of objective importance in favor of unbridled value relativism. Surely at least some of our culture’s appraisals of what is (or isn’t) important are valid and worth prioritizing. Take science, for instance, which generally outperforms armchair theories when it comes to explaining how things work. Even certain approaches to morality, according to thinkers like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, can be deemed objectively better than others.

Believing in the prospect and value of increasing our objective knowledge is also psychologically rewarding. It conjures a feeling of solidarity, the sense that we’re all striving for a common goal, however broad or nebulous it may sometimes seem. We might envision ourselves as part of an ongoing dialogue between our personal understanding of truth and value vis-à-vis that of our culture. At times, we may miss the mark and culture can help reorient us. On other occasions, culture may go off the rails and require some fresh ideas. Regardless, there’s always something important for us to explore or embrace, including periodic refreshment in the sea of the interesting.

My Bio (on my Personality Junkie website)