The Broken Compass: On the Fallacy of Finding Your True North of Interest

We are told, with great conviction, that the ultimate goal of curating our feeds and managing our knowledge is to discover our "true interests." The promise is alluring: once we declutter the digital noise, once we perfect our note-taking system, our authentic intellectual passions will shine through, a fixed point on our personal horizon. We will know, finally, what we are about. This is the myth of the True North of Interest, and I believe it is not only misleading but potentially stifling.

The advice is seductive because it offers a neat narrative of self-discovery. We imagine ourselves as explorers, sharpening our tools to better chart the territory of our own minds. We prune subscriptions, we tag notes with meticulous care, all in the service of uncovering a pre-existing, coherent intellectual self. The underlying assumption is that this self is already there, fully formed, waiting to be excavated from beneath the rubble of distraction. The system, then, is a kind of archaeological sieve.

But what if this core self is a phantom? What if our interests are not buried treasures to be found, but constellations we temporarily trace onto a chaotic sky? The insistence on finding a True North suggests that deviation is a form of failure. That book on medieval shipbuilding that captivated you for a week but doesn’t fit your "core themes"? A distraction. That sudden fascination with mycology that flares up and then fades? A stray spark, not part of the main fire. We are taught to be suspicious of these tangents, to see them as noise disrupting the signal of our "real" self.

This creates a peculiar form of anxiety. We begin to audit our curiosity, judging each new spark against an imagined, stable identity. The tools meant to serve our exploration start to dictate its boundaries. The fear of inconsistency, of being "unfocused," leads us to ignore the very impulses that make learning a dynamic and personal endeavor. We become curators of a static museum of the self, rather than gardeners cultivating a plot that is allowed to grow wild and surprising.

The more vibrant reality, I propose, is that we are not discovering our interests so much as we are inventing them, moment by moment, through the very act of reading and connecting. A true personal knowledge management system should not be a compass pointing to a fixed destination. It should be a logbook, a record of where we have wandered, full of dead ends, sudden vistas, and unexpected storms. The value is not in the coherence of the final map, but in the richness of the journey documented.

Embrace the broken compass. Allow your feeds to be a little messy, your notes to contain contradictions. The link between a poem and a scientific paper, the note that connects a personal memory to a historical event—these are not signs of a scattered mind, but of a mind alive to the possibilities of connection. Your True North is a moving target, a temporary alignment of curiosity, circumstance, and chance. The goal is not to find it, but to enjoy the perpetual, fascinating search.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: