Find The Thing That Will Save You

The Psychology of Autotelic Passions

A few weeks back, I found myself in a dim hull of a restaurant, somewhere off the coast of Portugal.

The kitchen only serves meat, cheese, and wine, and guests must arrive three hours in advance to land a table. Us patrons suffered charcuterie in no air conditioning for one reason and one reason only: To experience something called Fado.

When the lights finally dimmed, an old man rose from one of the tables. With more drama than practically necessary, he flung a black cape over his body, holding it close to his chest like a small, bald Dracula. He proceeded to fill the rounded, stone archways with the most haunting, melancholic melodies that seemed to seep directly from his soul.

This, I learned, is Fado: Mournful Portuguese music about poverty, fate, and the sea.

Hypnotized by the music and the wine, I began to muse: How did this elderly man from this tiny coastal town fall upon this particular passion, one that simultaneously requires late night pageantry, nostalgic brooding, and youthful self-abandon? Of all the tiny bars in the all the world. Of all the strange hobbies in all the world. Why was this man here doing this?

Within a matter of moments, the answer resounded within the archways of my own mind: This is the thing that saves him. This is the thing that gives him life. This is the thing that improbably spoke to his soul and shook it with an urgent resonance, begging him to spend otherwise unjustifiable amounts of time, money, and energy in his pursuit of it.

I believe we all have a Fado: A selfish passion that will save us.

I call it a selfish passion because it’s a passion that’s wholly unrelated to our lofty sense of existential duty. Many of us in the West have been conditioned to believe that our passions should be self-sacrificial: That they should contribute to our families, workplaces, communities, or the planet. After all, the word passion means to suffer (think: the Passion of the Christ).

But our Fado is of a far more self-serving nature: It doesn’t help you save the world — it helps you save yourself. It doesn’t get you further in life, it gets you deeper in life. It doesn’t make you healthier, but it makes life decadent. It doesn’t win you a parenting award or job promotion, but it gives you the vitality show up in the first place.

This indulgent quality somehow makes it all the more meaningful: It’s an activity we undertake not for our work, families, or communities, but for our own sense of aliveness. In this sense, our Fado is sublimely autotelic: We do it for its own sake.

When it comes to our Fado, the aliveness we feel is its singular goal: It has a purpose in, and not apart from, itself. It will not matter whether people watch you, support you, or otherwise egg you on: You will engage with your Fado because of course you will.

Burlesque dancing. Historical reenactment. Bird watching. Treasure hunting. Cosplay. Didgeridoo-ing. All of these are selfish passions. They beg for our energy and resources. They take time away from our family and friends. They rarely produce a trophy or paycheck. But they do, for whatever the offbeat reason, anchor us in our humanness.

Finding our Fado is one of the most crucial undertakings of the human spirit. What is so peculiar about our Fado is that it is often idiosyncratic and unexpected in the extreme — we rarely see it coming. But once we find it, we cannot imagine our lives without it, and it becomes a core source of meaning, connection, and beauty.

I have watched with unfolding awe as my mother has found her Fado in her late fifties: Horses. If you asked me a few years ago, trust me when I tell you: I would have never, ever guessed horses. But, as it’s want to do, her Fado found her, reigned her in, and has held her in its grip on her ever since. Horses, on a daily basis, save her.

Horses are now her source of energy. Her outlet for flow. Her spend-as-much, drive-as-much, do-as-much as it takes path to happiness. It’s not self-sacrificing, but self-serving. In fact, it’s perhaps the only self-serving thing my mother has ever done. And that’s why it’s so deeply, humanistically important.

Here’s how to know if you’ve found your Fado:

It makes you holistically better.

When we do anything for long enough, we learn activity-specific skills and knowledge. But with our Fado, we grow in ways that are seemingly unrelated to the passion itself. We may suddenly be more kind, patient, calm, confident, curious, or gifted in non-relevant domains. By indulging our Fado, we seem to become holistically, and mysteriously, better.

It takes you by surprise.

If you see it coming, it’s likely not your Fado. While many of us derive selfish pleasure from mainstream, commonly-loved activities like reading, hiking, or music, our Fado is likely of a quirkier, surprising, or more nuanced nature. There is a sense of discovery and pride that comes along with our selfish passion: Like we excavated it. polished it off, and made it our own.

It makes you fierce and decisive.

Our Fado draws out the tiger mother in us: We protect it, feed it, and whack away anything that threatens it. In this sense, decisions become easier and boundaries become firmer. The idea of taking a risk on its behalf — investing in it, moving across the country for it, rearranging our life around it — seems like an obvious choice.