The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

Chapter 15: Impersonal interests
In this chapter I wish to consider not those major
interests about which a man’ s life is built, but
those minor interests which fill his leisure and
afford relaxation from the tenseness of his more
serious preoccupations. In the life of the average
man his wife and children, his work and his
financial position occupy the main part of his
anxious and serious thought. Even if he has extramatrimonial
love affairs, they probably do not
concern him as profoundly in themselves as in their
possible effects upon his home life. The interests
which are bound up with his work I am not for the
present regarding as impersonal interests. A man
of science, for example, must keep abreast of
research in his own line. Towards such research
his feelings have the warmth and vividness
belonging to something intimately concerned with
his career, but if he reads about research in some
quite other science with which he is not
professionally concerned he reads in quite a
different spirit, not professionally, less critically,