Hi! This is Everything Is Amazing, a science-obsessed newsletter about curiosity, attention and wonder. For the next 6 weeks I’m on a between-seasons break, so you won’t get anything new from me until mid-November. If that sounds like a blessing, okay then! Brutal but fair. (Ouch.) But if you do want to get everything I’ll be writing for paid subscribers, and follow along on my quest for a good night’s sleep according to the latest science, you can join them by clicking below: Today, though, here’s a rerun from the very first season of EiA back in 2021 (originally here), which is the closest thing to a manifesto for this project that I’ve written to date. Four years later, it seems even harder to untangle your own enthusiasms from that mass of overwhelming overwhelm that seems a feature of using the internet these days - so I reckon it’s still all too timely. Here’s the story of someone who yelled OKAY THAT’S IT, I’M DONE WITH THE WEB - and the surprising reality of what happened next. It’s 2012, and journalist Paul Miller is feeling swamped.
So Miller decides to get offline - for 12 whole months. His employers at online magazine The Verge agree to let him write about his new, wholly offline life, which gives him enough money to live on. He sets up an iPad locked in Airplane mode, and once he’s finished writing each article, he physically hands the machine over to a colleague for uploading to the Web. There are new challenges, for sure. Miller can’t research anything online, so finding a single statistic turns from a 10-second keyword search into a physical journey to a local library and a half-hour trawl through its archives. Suddenly, so much information is further away in time and space, harder to access, and rarely instantly available on demand. (He always has to plan ahead.) But on the whole, his new lifestyle seems to suit him:
And his employers are delighted:
So that’s it then? The internet is the root of all evil - a mindless, soul-crushing, rage-inducing distraction that is ruining our mental and physical health? And therefore the secret to our wellbeing is to unplug from the Matrix and take a radical digital detox (brilliantly nicknamed “Waldenponding” by writer Venkat Rao)? Not so fast. One year later, Miller sums up:
What he found outside of the internet was a lot of emptiness and silence. Both were welcome at first. Being able to hear himself think and take his time over everyday activities? Delightful. But then novelty wore off - and his problems began. By removing the Web, he broke all the human connections that had made him feel part of overlapping networks of folk he wanted to be around. He discovered, for the first time, how the “virtual” isn’t something that can easily be unpicked from the “real,” since in today’s world, each depends upon the other in ways we rarely think about… And he discovered this:
Waldenponding was a bust. The internet was part of the problem, yes, but quitting it didn’t seem to be that golden ticket to a richer, less distracted life that Miller thought it would be. So what will work? I spend a lot of time in this newsletter throwing the word “curiosity” around, so maybe it’s time to sketch the edges of the concept. It’s a curiosity in itself that despite being the focus of thousands of years of human enquiry, the science of curiosity is in its infancy. Partly this reflects how little we still know about the working human brain, the hardware running our curiosity-software. And partly it’s because it crosses so many disciplines: a bit of psychology here, a little philosophy there… But, speaking very broadly, here are two major types of working curiosity. The first is called diversive. It’s the thrill of the shiny and novel - the kind of thing you experience every day when travelling somewhere new, as Anna Brones said here. It’s also why you can’t stop clicking those infuriating headlines like “You’ll Never Guess What Happens Next” and “These Three Things Will Shock You”. Clickbait like this (often displayed in chumboxes of attention-grabbing garbage) is weaponised diversive curiosity - the attraction of novelty, combined with a largely false promise of something you really want to know the answer to. And the end result? It feels like your fault. You hate yourself for clicking it (even though you were actually tricked into doing it). It’s a really toxic cycle of triggering and shaming. The only good clickbait on the internet is at Clickhole, a parody site: Diversive curiosity is why you can’t stop scrolling. Or signing up to anything described as “the next big thing.” Or doing pretty much anything where you’re not really enjoying yourself, only sort of digging in a half-comatose kind of way, but you guess it’s better than doing nothing? Novelty for novelty’s sake is deeply distracting - and incredibly shallow. It’s training for a lifetime automatically skimming the surface of things without going deeper (making you perfect prey for internet advertisers). It teaches your brain to sip the world instead of drinking deeply from it. It fritters away a few spare minutes here and there, again and again, until you’ve lost hours, days, weeks, even years to… Who knows? You can’t remember. Nothing stuck. To balance this out, there’s the other type of curiosity. When you latch onto something specific and get healthily obsessed with it (aka. ‘nerding out’), that’s your epistemic curiosity kicking in. This sometimes gets called “academic curiosity,” because that’s how you’re trained in higher education. You get more and more specialised about what you know. But the best illustration of the power of epistemic curiosity is to watch something like this: A musician is someone who returns to the same piece of wood, metal and cured animal intestines (or whatever the modern equivalent is), again and again and again, until they are amazingly good at coaxing enjoyable noises out of it. To get as good as my friends The Urban Folk Quartet (above) is the super-focused work of decades. And it requires huge amounts of epistemic curiosity. What more could I learn about this one thing? How much more is there to know? What can I learn about it that nobody else has learned before? How deep does this thing go? Going full-on epistemically curious is like falling in love. Continually. Endlessly. But choosing a thing to focus epistemic curiosity on is really, really hard. Take that message the aspirational internet has been flinging at you for years: “Find Your Passion!” Ah. What a nice thing it would be to know that you’ve found a vocation or hobby, or a small bunch of them, that you can single-mindedly devote huge chunks of the rest of your life to. How comforting that would be! Except, at the very same time, that same internet is fire-hosing us with triggers for our diversive curiosity that make us unable to choose. What if I pick the wrong thing? If I do this thing for the next week, I’ll miss distractedly half-assing 50 other things! What do I do? HALP. It’s a psychological tug of war that leaves you trapped in the middle, frustrated and miserable - and, as with clickbait, you usually blame yourself for it. It’s a really horrible feeling. And it stops us becoming healthily obsessed with really interesting things that would improve our mood no end. And I think I have a solution. Well, it’s not really my solution. I’m just channelling an amalgam of advice from people way smarter than me. (Start with Cal Newport, for example. Move on to Jenny Odell. Then read this by Nir Eyal. Then check out Ian Leslie’s book. And so on.) But I’m going to be cheeky, and invent a law named after myself. Sowden’s First Law Of Curiosity:“You just have to try lots of different stuff for no damn reason.”Yeah, I don’t think it’ll catch on either. Oh well. But the point here is this: If “finding your passion(s)” is so hard to do when your rational, logical brain gets involved (because it’s so easily and completely hijacked by that tug-o’war of logical motivations)… Then why not leave the whole thing to chance? Or more specifically: why not just throw yourself for a short period of time into a whole bunch of somewhat random things, one after the other? The “for no damn reason” part of that Law is really important here. One of the jobs of curiosity is to make you aware of things you didn’t previously know. Unfortunately, because we think we should be guided by “sensible” (ie. rationally arguable) reasons to do things, conveniently forgetting how emotion-driven almost all our decisions are, we’re always deciding on our next actions based on what we currently know - not what we don’t yet know, or what we don’t know we don’t know. (Yes, this is head-spinning stuff.) In contrast, the gifts of applied curiosity are usually only seen clearly with hindsight. “When I first started looking at this thing, I never would have dreamed it would lead me here.” But with training, you get a feel for the good stuff. Just an inkling. This is the ‘gut feeling’ that journalists develop over time, and have such difficulty explaining to someone else. They know there might be a story in the thing they’re becoming curious about - but they don’t yet know the shape of it. So they say to their editors (or to themselves) “give me a week to find the story here,” with the unspoken understanding that it might go absolutely nowhere. All this means that making “sensible” and “rational” strategic decisions in advance is actually of very little help here - because they’re all based on the ignorance that comes before discovery leads to enlightenment. To learn something absolutely and utterly new to you, you need to add a little chaos to the proceedings. Something random and unpredictable. Maybe even something stupid. Like, say, a series of random-looking weekly challenges that send you in unexpected directions! That’s my aim for you with this newsletter. So if I’d met Paul Miller in a coffee shop back then, and if I’d known back then what I know now, I’d say this to him:
Then he’d give me a thumbs-up, quickly finish his drink and head out the door - and I’d never see him again, because he’d choose a different coffee shop in future. Yeah, nice place, good coffee. Too many weirdos. But I hope I’d have made him curious enough to just give it a go. He’d never guess what happens next. If that gave you a few ideas, I have another piece behind the paywall that uses lessons from modern behavioural psychology to keep you creatively moving forward across that gap between wanting to do a thing and having done it, which I’ve nicknamed “the chasm of Ughhhh”. From now until the middle of November when the next season begins, all paid subscriptions to Everything Is Amazing are 10% off. A paid subscription would let you read that piece, give you everything new I’m writing over the next 6 weeks, give you access to all paywalled articles in the archive, and give you an optional one-to-one ‘curiosity call’ to motivate you to chase your own nerdiness in a similar way, as I explained here. You’ll also be helping this newsletter exist. It’s completely dependent on reader support - and since 2022 when EiA became my fulltime job, so am I. In the most real of senses, you’re helping keep the lights on - but you’re also helping me grow this project, hunt a few stories in person and get even weirder. That’s what you’d be investing in. Click below to sign up with a 10% discount. Thank you so much! Images: Chris Lawton; SabbraCadabra; ROBIN WORRALL; nikko macaspac; Markus Spiske; Ruslan Gibadullin; Danielle MacInnes; Free-Images. |