the lie of the niche

on multi-passion, imagination, and staying loyal to your own nature

we live in an age obsessed with narrowing.

pick a lane. find your niche. become known for one thing.

that advice is everywhere, delivered with the confidence of inevitability. as if specialization is a law of nature. as if becoming smaller is the price of becoming real.

and yet, for many of us, that story never quite lands.

we try to comply. we try to funnel our curiosity into a single channel, trim away the interests that don’t “fit,” quiet the parts of ourselves that wander too far from the center.

but the cost is familiar: a low-grade grief, a sense of self-betrayal, the feeling that we are cooperating in our own diminishment.

what. a. line.

being drawn to many things is the most ordinary thing in the world.

it’s human.

imagination itself is what makes us human in the first place.

capitalism, however, prefers clarity over complexity. specialization makes people easier to place. easier to evaluate. easier to extract value from.

a narrow role slots neatly into the machine.

a whole person does not.

so we are taught, subtly, constantly, to fragment ourselves. to choose which part gets to count.

to make the rest of ourselves a hobby, a side gig, or a guilty pleasure we only get to indulge in after the “real” work is done.

maybe this is backwards.

maybe our curiosity is not a liability to be managed but a signal.

maybe the pull towards many domains is orientation.

maybe something essential is lost when we amputate parts of ourselves in the name of focus.

to me, this tension feels especially sharp now.

in an age where our tools are increasingly capable, where execution can be automated, accelerated, and outsourced, the real constraint is no longer what we can technically produce.

it’s what we can imagine. it’s our ability to see connections, to synthesize across domains, to sense what doesn’t yet exist but wants to.

imagination doesn’t live in narrow corridors. imagination thrives in overlap. in people who read, who listen, who follow strange leads and refuse to confine themselves to one path.

(The lie of the niche on YouTube: https://youtube.com/shorts/jxYsapyA0r0?feature=share)

wholeness is the ground state

in non-dual tantra, reality is already whole. nothing needs to be purified, reduced, or transcended to be sacred. the divine is found by recognizing that all parts of yourself, every curiosity, every desire, every direction you are pulled, is already an expression of consciousness exploring itself.

from this view, the question is not: which part of you is the real one?

but rather: how is the whole expressing itself right now?

fragmentation is forgetting. narrowing the self is contraction mistaken for focus.

when capitalism says “pick one,” it’s asking you to make yourself legible to a system that benefits from your reduction.

consciousness does not narrow unnecessarily. why would the infinite limit itself?

to be clear, this is not an argument against depth. tantric practice is profoundly disciplined. but the discipline is not about elimination. it’s about expanding your capacity to hold more without fragmenting.

to stay present with complexity and intensity rather than simplifying it away.

what if being multi-passionate is not a scattered modern condition but a remembering?

a refusal to forget your own wholeness in service of a system that needs you smaller?

This space is better when more people speak up. You’re welcome to join the conversation, however big or small your thoughts feel.

two movements of creative development

there is a pattern that emerges when you look closely at people who have managed to stay whole while also creating exceptional work.

they move through two distinct phases not as fixed identities but as territories of becoming.

the first is a period of wide exploration. this is where curiosity leads. where you follow what lights you up without demanding that it justify itself. where taste develops through exposure.

where the inner world expands in many directions at once, gathering images, ideas, questions, obsessions.

consider someone who spends years moving between music production, graphic design, and writing. they are learning how rhythms work, how visual composition creates meaning, how sentences build momentum. no single domain claims them completely. they are gathering a vocabulary.

this phase is essential. without it, there is no raw material. no sense of what calls to you and what doesn’t. it’s a time when you discover what you are actually interested in, not what you’re supposed to be interested in.

but this phase alone does not lead to mastery.

at some point, exploration becomes diffusion. the inner world stays rich, but it remains mostly unexpressed. potential hovers, beautiful and unrealized, because there is no container strong enough to hold it.

this is where the second movement begins.

this is a deepening. a decision about which interests to devote sustained attention to.

a learning about how to hold multiple threads without fragmentation.

that same person might decide to make music seriously, but the years spent studying design inform their album artwork and visual identity. the writing practice shows up in their lyrics, their liner notes, the way they talk about their work in interviews.

nothing was wasted. everything cross-pollinates.

consider someone who studied biology and then pivoted to data visualization and then got interested in climate communication. each shift might look scattered from the outside but eventually they create data-driven climate narratives that only someone with that exact combination of knowledge could make. their range becomes their signature.

this is how breadth becomes depth.

the shift is subtle but consequential. it’s the difference between dabbling and developing.

the lie of the niche

there is a lie embedded in the culture of niching: that seriousness requires reduction. that devotion demands exclusion. that to be committed, you must give something up.

commitment is not the same thing as constriction.

you can be devoted to depth without severing yourself from breadth. you can develop real skill in multiple domains. you can let your interests inform each other, creating work that exists at the intersection of things that are rarely combined.

“Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.”

think of the person who is both a therapist and a ceramicist. their understanding of the body, pf presence, of what it means to work with resistance, all of it shows up in both practices. the clay teaches them things about therapy. therapy teaches them things about clay. neither one is the “side project.”

this is not easy. resisting specialization makes you harder to categorize, harder to market, harder to explain at a dinner party.

but attention is not a finite resource to be hoarded in one direction. the more fully you inhabit your curiosity, the more there is.

you will be asked, again and again, to pick one thing. to make it simpler for people to understand what you do.

but, there is a kind of integrity in refusing to collapse your inner world just to be understood more quickly. a loyalty to your own nature that doesn’t always pay off immediately, but pays in aliveness. in the texture of your work. in the connections you are able to make that others miss.

I write for free, once or twice a week, but the real joy is hearing from readers. You’re always welcome to respond. Hit ‘reply’ or send me a message below.

if you are someone who feels pulled in many directions, you may have been told that this is something you’ll eventually outgrow. that maturity looks like choosing and settling and simplifying.

but I think that is wrong. I think this moment in our world is asking us for wholeness, not specialization.

you contain multitudes. you always have. the question was never whether you should, only whether you’d be allowed to.

you don’t need to prove the usefulness of your curiosity. you don’t need to optimize it, brand it, or justify it in advance.

the world we are entering will be shaped by those who can hold many threads at once, and refuse to cut themselves apart to do it.

being multi-passionate just might be the best thing that ever happened to you.

FYI: I’ve started a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s a place where I highlight what’s working in the fight for a more balanced future. You can read it here: forpeopleandpla.net

Further reading:

where attention goes, energy flows

Leading by Condition

what is emerging? what is in the way?

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With love, Bri Chapman