From scattered interests to a coherent identity.

“Scattered.” It’s the word people reach for when they have many interests and no story that holds them together. I used it about myself for a long time.

Here’s what I eventually understood: scattered isn’t a personality. It’s a stage. It’s what range feels like before it’s connected.

Multiplicity — having many dimensions — is simply being a complex human. Fragmentation is something else: when those dimensions compete, stay isolated, or get suppressed because you can’t see how they belong to the same person. The pain isn’t in having many interests. It’s in the disconnection between them.

Which means the goal isn’t to have fewer interests. It’s to connect the ones you have.

Coherence doesn’t come from cutting. It comes from finding the relationships. Writing feeds the way I think about technology. What I learn in one field quietly reshapes another. An experience that seemed unrelated turns out to inform everything. When you start noticing those links, “scattered” slowly turns into “woven.”

A coherent identity isn’t a fixed label you land on and defend. It’s a direction — stable enough to recognise, open enough to keep evolving. You can hold a clear sense of who you are and keep changing. In fact, that’s the only kind of identity that survives a curious life.

If you feel scattered right now, try this: instead of asking which interest to drop, ask what any two of them have in common. Then a third. You’re not looking for a category. You’re looking for the thread — the thing underneath that makes them yours.

The scattered feeling is real. It’s also not the end of the story. It’s the raw material.