The Gift of Hindsight
Written by: Andy Jacques
“I think we will all remember Andy as the guy with many weird interests with no practical use,” said Mariana Marhefka, an 8th grader at the time. It was the very last day of school, her graduation day, and I was in seventh grade. At the time, we were talking about how we will all remember each other. She was pointing out that all my interests were always about unconventional things, and how they all had the same quality, being things that I am obsessed with for a short period of time, then turning into small hobbies for a longer time before finally dying out. And she was right. From cows to Tesla’s to a nerdy card game called Magic: The Gathering, I have had a lot of different interests, and they have had an impact on my life in a way that not that many people understand. So in keeping with this theme, I would like to tell you about the evolution of my interests, and how they help make me, me.
When I was in first grade, living just a few miles west of Palo Alto, I was at a school that was an hour away from my house, which meant I would get picked up at 6 PM. I was lonely and had no friends. I needed something I could spend time doing, and I needed something to connect with people with. I needed an interest. Of course, I could not just have any interest. It needed a few qualities that would make it stick. Firstly, this interest needed to be something that I could spend time doing without getting bored. It also needed to be something that I could learn about. Lastly, It needed to be something that other people were interested in, too. If it was just me alone with my interest I would still like it, but it would bring me a lot more happiness if I explored that interest with a friend. With all of that in mind, I decided to find an interest.
The first interest I found was solving the Rubik’s Cube. The first Rubik’s Cube I learned to solve was called the void cube, with none of the sides having a center. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the hobby, but my hobby was not in solving as fast as possible, like most people, but rather in learning how to solve as many different variations as possible. This ended up actually working out for me.
Every day after school for the next two years, I would sit outside on the school playground and learn how to solve a new variation of the Rubik’s Cube. The only other place I could go was the library, and I had already been kicked out a few times for being too loud, so I had to sit outside. It was almost always cold, windy, and rainy, to the point where I could sometimes feel little drops of hail biting my skin as I worked, but I stuck with it. On average, It would take me about a month to learn how to solve a new cube, with the end goal being getting my solve time under 5 minutes. Soon, I had amassed a large collection of cubes, almost all of which I knew how to solve.
I felt like I was hitting my stride. My new hobby was different every time, something I could spend a lot of time learning about, and even something that other people did, too. It checked all the boxes. I felt like I could fly. I was about to touch the sky, and then suddenly, everything fell apart. I lost my interest in cubing. I lost the one thing that I was better than anyone else at. I even lost my friends. But why? Why was cubing such a great interest, up until it wasn’t? What happened?
Although cubing was a good hobby for me, if I looked closer, I could see that it was actually lacking two of the main ingredients an interest needs to have for me. Although I could spend a lot of time learning about it, I soon learned how to solve every cube I owned, and ended up getting bored with it. And even though other people liked cubing, I was the only one who was interested in solving lots of different cubes, where everyone else was interested in solving the three by three as fast as possible. Because I was not good at solving the Rubik’s cube quickly, I felt like I had no one to share the interest with. Cubing soon stopped being a hobby for me, right at the time that something else important came into my life; I had just joined Synapse school.
I was in second grade at the time, in a totally new environment with people I didn’t know, and nothing that set me apart from anybody else. I was desperate, so I did something that I would regret for a very long time because it would lead me on to a chain of events that still trouble me to this day. Everyone ended up thinking I was weird, which greatly harmed my emotional state. What I did was I invented the persona of Andy: The Guy Who Is Obsessed with Cows.
It didn’t turn out the way I would have liked. I don’t really know what I would have liked, but it was certainly not this. I made it look like I was so obsessed with cows, instead of people liking my characteristics as a person and becoming friends with me, they stayed away from me because they thought I was too weird. Hindsight is a gift, and although some of the interests that I had were total failures, they still taught me something. Cows taught me that my interest needed to be real, and not just a tool to try to increase my popularity.
After a few months without an interest, I found another one that I would again lose. At the time, I was 9 years old. This interest was different from all the rest, because it branched into many different things, but most of it had a connection to vehicles and tech. When my dad bought a new car, I was very excited to learn about it. After a few months of researching about the car and the company that made it, I found what I thought was the coolest car company ever: Tesla. My interest in Teslas was very different from others, because my family did not actually have a Tesla. I learned all I could about it, but I had never actually been in one, which made the passion seem pointless. After spending about four months learning about Teslas, I soon ran out of interesting things to learn about, so I moved on to all cars in general, and then later, all technology in general. I spent a lot of time learning about technology. I think that this interest lasted for over a year, longer than any of the other previous interests. Sadly, there was not one other person in my grade who was interested in technology, so although I could learn a lot about it, I could not share my findings with anyone. Once I realized that I wasn’t getting much happiness out of this interest, I again went back to looking for another interest. The lesson that technology taught me is that the more content an interest has, the longer I stay with it, but all interests I have need to be things that I can share with other people.
After I lost interest in technology, I went for about six months with no interest, no hobbies, and no friends. I was 11 years old. All of my previous friends now liked a game called Magic: The Gathering, and when I took one look at the game, I told them it was stupid, and I never wanted to play it. But I was lonely. I didn’t ever have anything to look forward to, so every day was the same. Every minute of every day was filled with either work or boredom. As I look back at the work that I had done during this time, one piece of writing really stands out to me because it reflected really well the emotional state that I was in while writing it. My sixth grade choose your own adventure story followed a character who was my age at the time and also had no friends or anything to look forward to. There were many things that were exaggerated, but I still thought of my character as myself in a different world. To this day, this time of my life is not one that I like to remember.
Ironically, the interest that took me out of these sad six months was also the one that made me have no friends in the first place. One of my friends from a few years prior, Deniz, gave me a pack of 15 Magic: The Gathering cards in order to try to get me into the game. Even though I previously thought that the game was stupid, for some reason, owning real cards made me want to learn more, so I watched some videos, learned how to play, and bought my first deck of cards.
Every day at lunch, I would bring my deck to play Magic against my friends. For the first month, I lost every game I played, but I stuck with it because I finally had an interest that I could share with friends. I remember clearly when I won my first game, waiting for the confirmation that I had won from my opponent. The adrenaline made the wait feel so long, but when I was finally informed that I had won, I remember being as excited as can be, standing up and shouting to the entire building, “I won my first game of Magic! I am a genius!” This was the happiest I had felt for over a year, and I couldn’t wait to get that feeling again.
Magic has been a hobby of mine for almost two years now, and I am really happy that I got into it. I even made an elective about it, focussing on the math and programming elements of the game, which I then later adapted into a summer camp, which I led and got 14 people to attend. Magic Fulfills all three elements of a successful interest, I would not get bored with it, because new sets are released every three months, with new cards to play with. There were so many strategies I could learn about, and learning about it pays off because the more I learn, the better I get. And lastly, I had many friends I could share my interest with. Sadly, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I was not able to play Magic with anyone, and after the pandemic, no one was interested in Magic anymore.
I have been trying to bring it back, but only time will tell if I can stay with this interest or be forced to find another one. Even though all my interests were thought of as weird at times, they have all been very important to me, and they have all had a large impact on my emotional state.
