Regarding your wide-reaching curiosity, I don’t see it as a bug, but as a feature. It tells me you’re interested in life and that you’re an interesting person to be around. That’s a win in my book.
My interests wax and wane for a variety of reasons and I don’t let that cycle get me down. That cycling is part of life, and I don’t think you should worry about it either. Children cycle through interests all the time and we adults encourage it. I don’t see why, as adults, we can’t wildly pursue interests that way too. Who says we must dedicate ourselves to one interest for an extended period? Is it because it’s the adult thing to do? Nonsense.
*Children cycle through interests all the time and we adults encourage it.*
Or at least we should. My mother never let me forget that I "outgrew" my obligatory brief childhood fascination with dinosaurs and brought it up as a reason not to take seriously any interest I had thenceforth. When last we spoke about ten years ago, she was still on about it.
Don't be like my mother. Pursue curiousity with abandon and fickleness.
I'm thinking that it's neither a feature nor a bug, just a quality, with it's attendant pros and cons. On one hand, it's invigorating to get into new topics (even new-old topics), on the other you're always starting back at, if not square one, then square two, and never sticking with it long enough to become more advanced. What can we do, though? I'll try to celebrate my curiosity!
Maybe make a conscious effort to pursue one interest more deeply and cycle normally through the rest? For example, when interest strikes again, make plans to go to a Zen monastery for a weekend or even weeklong (!) retreat or start attending services at your local Zen temple for a while. Build some community, which can keep your interest going and help you plunge more deeply into the subject.
It would certainly require a conscious imbalance to dig deeper during successive bouts of engagement. That, and maybe if I took better notes or created flashcards. That way I could speed up the period of reacquaintance.
I agree with Karen's comment. Curiousity is a feature, not a bug. ElizabethGilbert points out that if you haven't found your passion, curiousity is a good place to look for it. And she also points out that if you never find your passion -- the thing you can concentrate on to the exclusion of all other temptations -- then having lived a life of curiousity is not a bad alternative.
Having spent most of my life agonizing over not being able to choose one thing, I've had a pretty great and interesting life as a result of the searching.
Still... and having a few things that have stuck with me through it all, and now hopefully and increasingly feeling that I have finallly found the Intellectual True Love of My Life, I'm also aware of what I read once -- I think it was in one of those "10,0000 hour" books that were popular for a bit -- that to an expert, novelty is in the mastery of extreme detail. And that's the kind of focus that I really love, even beyond what I call "raccoon syndrome" ie, being tempted by the next shiny object. There is something very like meditation or prayer to me, to be lose myself in a nuance that would be of no interest or comprehension to someone who was just dabbling in the subject area. I do that increasingly these days and I find it so much richer than the Dabble.
But that said, I end where I began. I only found my true love by doing A LOT of speed (and not so speed) dating...
I think the kind of focus you really love is akin to entering Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" state. If you haven't read his "Flow: Psychology of Optimal Experience", you should!
Flow is one part of it. Yes. What I was attempting to convey though is something that I think is more interesting and not as widely understood.
Smart people have a craving for novelty. We get bored easily. And most of the time. We think that's because we need to switch what we're doing. We blame the subject matter. As a result, some of the smartest people are constantly stuck at the beginning of things. For most of us, as you point out in your article, this is not fully satisfying.
Smart people also need for the most part the satisfaction of becoming masters at something. Fulfilling the potential of our intellect. That doesn't happen with a constant series of beginnings when the next shiny object attracts our attention.
The quote I was referencing, that I don't remember where it's from, points out that when you commit to one thing, it doesn't take away the craving for novelty. The novelty comes from nuance. From an increasing mastery comes an increasing ability to see things in finer and finer detail. And that becomes what's new.
I'm tempted to use an example from my own life, but I think it would be too idiosyncratic. So let's talk instead about a gardener, since I've been reading about George Harrison recently, becoming masterful at gardening.
When a master gardener gets bored, they don't give up gardening. Or at least not the ones who stick with it, to be circular with reasoning. Instead, maybe they focus on learning about a new technique, or why this grows better here than there. Or developing some new strain of rose. I don't know. I'm not a gardener so this was probably not the best example.
The point is, if the gardener turns away from gardening because they're bored, they both lose the ability to be a master, and we lose the collective value of their accumulated mastery. Especially if they never Stick around long enough to become a master.
There is novelty in nuance. But we don't get to the nuance if we are constantly pursuing the next shiny object.
I say this, after a lifetime of doing just that, flitting from one shiny object to the next. From one shiny identity and life and place to the next. And now having found what I think is the love of my life intellectually, I'm starting for the first time to understand this new way of saying novelty and curiosity.
That's what I was attempting to articulate above and apparently didn't do a good job of! Hopefully this is better
PS I'm not sure that one can get true flow at the beginning of anything. One might get an approximation, but for example it's like playing guitar. At the beginning when you're first learning, it's all bumpy and your fingers go everywhere and nothing sounds right. And it takes a long time for that flow to happen. It takes a long time to be confident enough of the instrument that you can relax into the flow.
Not saying flow can never happen at the beginning, but I'm saying I think it's a different less deep kind of flow.
I'm not sure, even during my choppy ukulele practice I found elements of time slipping by unnoticed. I enjoyed the concentration and repetition, even if the music was subpar.
Yes, Ij'm not really intending this to be about flow (I'm not a big believer in flow, I think it's fundamentally misunderstood).
I'm talking about something holding one's attention over the long haul by staying with it long enough to understand nuance that's not apparent or available to a novice, as opposed to getting bored and flitting to the next thing.
What I mean is that the larger, more salient point I'm endeavoring to make has nothing to do with flow per se. It's about the idea that in order to satisfy our craving for novelty, we think we have to do something new. In reality, there is arguably more interesting and richer novelty to be found in staying with something long enough to discern nuance that isn't visible or interesting to a notice. That's not something I've seen discussed anywhere except in whatever book I first saw it in and I think it's a vital missing piece of the search for meaning.
I'm not seeing a way to edit a comment on my phone, so I'll just drop this here. The other thing that I didn't say is that we don't discern nuance until we have mastery. That's why my gardening example is probably for shit because I don't know enough about gardening to know what nuances a gardener would discern at a master level. So it's easy to look at something and think there's not enough there. Because the nuance doesn't reveal itself until quite a ways in.
Regarding your wide-reaching curiosity, I don’t see it as a bug, but as a feature. It tells me you’re interested in life and that you’re an interesting person to be around. That’s a win in my book.
My interests wax and wane for a variety of reasons and I don’t let that cycle get me down. That cycling is part of life, and I don’t think you should worry about it either. Children cycle through interests all the time and we adults encourage it. I don’t see why, as adults, we can’t wildly pursue interests that way too. Who says we must dedicate ourselves to one interest for an extended period? Is it because it’s the adult thing to do? Nonsense.
*Children cycle through interests all the time and we adults encourage it.*
Or at least we should. My mother never let me forget that I "outgrew" my obligatory brief childhood fascination with dinosaurs and brought it up as a reason not to take seriously any interest I had thenceforth. When last we spoke about ten years ago, she was still on about it.
Don't be like my mother. Pursue curiousity with abandon and fickleness.
Your mother is a spoilsport -- her judgement of curiosities isn't about you at all!
I'm thinking that it's neither a feature nor a bug, just a quality, with it's attendant pros and cons. On one hand, it's invigorating to get into new topics (even new-old topics), on the other you're always starting back at, if not square one, then square two, and never sticking with it long enough to become more advanced. What can we do, though? I'll try to celebrate my curiosity!
Maybe make a conscious effort to pursue one interest more deeply and cycle normally through the rest? For example, when interest strikes again, make plans to go to a Zen monastery for a weekend or even weeklong (!) retreat or start attending services at your local Zen temple for a while. Build some community, which can keep your interest going and help you plunge more deeply into the subject.
It would certainly require a conscious imbalance to dig deeper during successive bouts of engagement. That, and maybe if I took better notes or created flashcards. That way I could speed up the period of reacquaintance.
I agree with Karen's comment. Curiousity is a feature, not a bug. ElizabethGilbert points out that if you haven't found your passion, curiousity is a good place to look for it. And she also points out that if you never find your passion -- the thing you can concentrate on to the exclusion of all other temptations -- then having lived a life of curiousity is not a bad alternative.
Having spent most of my life agonizing over not being able to choose one thing, I've had a pretty great and interesting life as a result of the searching.
Still... and having a few things that have stuck with me through it all, and now hopefully and increasingly feeling that I have finallly found the Intellectual True Love of My Life, I'm also aware of what I read once -- I think it was in one of those "10,0000 hour" books that were popular for a bit -- that to an expert, novelty is in the mastery of extreme detail. And that's the kind of focus that I really love, even beyond what I call "raccoon syndrome" ie, being tempted by the next shiny object. There is something very like meditation or prayer to me, to be lose myself in a nuance that would be of no interest or comprehension to someone who was just dabbling in the subject area. I do that increasingly these days and I find it so much richer than the Dabble.
But that said, I end where I began. I only found my true love by doing A LOT of speed (and not so speed) dating...
I think the kind of focus you really love is akin to entering Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" state. If you haven't read his "Flow: Psychology of Optimal Experience", you should!
Flow is one part of it. Yes. What I was attempting to convey though is something that I think is more interesting and not as widely understood.
Smart people have a craving for novelty. We get bored easily. And most of the time. We think that's because we need to switch what we're doing. We blame the subject matter. As a result, some of the smartest people are constantly stuck at the beginning of things. For most of us, as you point out in your article, this is not fully satisfying.
Smart people also need for the most part the satisfaction of becoming masters at something. Fulfilling the potential of our intellect. That doesn't happen with a constant series of beginnings when the next shiny object attracts our attention.
The quote I was referencing, that I don't remember where it's from, points out that when you commit to one thing, it doesn't take away the craving for novelty. The novelty comes from nuance. From an increasing mastery comes an increasing ability to see things in finer and finer detail. And that becomes what's new.
I'm tempted to use an example from my own life, but I think it would be too idiosyncratic. So let's talk instead about a gardener, since I've been reading about George Harrison recently, becoming masterful at gardening.
When a master gardener gets bored, they don't give up gardening. Or at least not the ones who stick with it, to be circular with reasoning. Instead, maybe they focus on learning about a new technique, or why this grows better here than there. Or developing some new strain of rose. I don't know. I'm not a gardener so this was probably not the best example.
The point is, if the gardener turns away from gardening because they're bored, they both lose the ability to be a master, and we lose the collective value of their accumulated mastery. Especially if they never Stick around long enough to become a master.
There is novelty in nuance. But we don't get to the nuance if we are constantly pursuing the next shiny object.
I say this, after a lifetime of doing just that, flitting from one shiny object to the next. From one shiny identity and life and place to the next. And now having found what I think is the love of my life intellectually, I'm starting for the first time to understand this new way of saying novelty and curiosity.
That's what I was attempting to articulate above and apparently didn't do a good job of! Hopefully this is better
PS I'm not sure that one can get true flow at the beginning of anything. One might get an approximation, but for example it's like playing guitar. At the beginning when you're first learning, it's all bumpy and your fingers go everywhere and nothing sounds right. And it takes a long time for that flow to happen. It takes a long time to be confident enough of the instrument that you can relax into the flow.
Not saying flow can never happen at the beginning, but I'm saying I think it's a different less deep kind of flow.
I'm not sure, even during my choppy ukulele practice I found elements of time slipping by unnoticed. I enjoyed the concentration and repetition, even if the music was subpar.
Yes, Ij'm not really intending this to be about flow (I'm not a big believer in flow, I think it's fundamentally misunderstood).
I'm talking about something holding one's attention over the long haul by staying with it long enough to understand nuance that's not apparent or available to a novice, as opposed to getting bored and flitting to the next thing.
argh, I wish Substack would let us edit comments.
What I mean is that the larger, more salient point I'm endeavoring to make has nothing to do with flow per se. It's about the idea that in order to satisfy our craving for novelty, we think we have to do something new. In reality, there is arguably more interesting and richer novelty to be found in staying with something long enough to discern nuance that isn't visible or interesting to a notice. That's not something I've seen discussed anywhere except in whatever book I first saw it in and I think it's a vital missing piece of the search for meaning.
I'm not seeing a way to edit a comment on my phone, so I'll just drop this here. The other thing that I didn't say is that we don't discern nuance until we have mastery. That's why my gardening example is probably for shit because I don't know enough about gardening to know what nuances a gardener would discern at a master level. So it's easy to look at something and think there's not enough there. Because the nuance doesn't reveal itself until quite a ways in.