Ironically, “interest” and “interesting” are vaguely boring words compared to words like “passion” or “excitement”. (“Interesting” can even be negative: it’s the euphemism you might deploy about your friend’s terrible choices, or inedible cooking, if you didn’t want to hurt their feelings too much.) But in his book Creating a Life, the Jungian therapist James Hollis makes a powerful case that an interesting life – interesting to you, that is, not necessarily to other people – might in fact be the highest and best goal to which any of us could aspire. His own specialism of psychotherapy, he writes,
…will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting. You will come to more and more complex riddles wrapped within yourself and your relationships. This claim seems small potatoes to the anxious consumer world, but it is an immense gift, a stupendous contribution. Think of it: your own life might become more interesting to you! Consciousness is the gift, and that is the best it gets.
Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.
Not surprising here, Emily Dickinson said it first:
To be alive—is Power—
Existence—in itself—
Without a further function—
Omnipotence—Enough—To be alive—and Will!
‘Tis able as a God—
The Maker—of Ourselves—be what—
Such being Finitude!