Wonder
I saw this great tweet from Tim Urban this morning and it inspired me to think about what other wonderful things we take for granted in our lives.
Here's a brief list of additions:
- be chauffered door-to-door by a machine that accelerates smoothly and makes perfect turns
- decide to go anywhere in the world and get there in less than 2 days, perhaps making use of a flying metal tube
- literally fly and see the world from a vantage point that none of my ancestors ever have
- communicate with anyone around the world regardless of what language they speak
- view my home and anywhere else from a satellite orbiting the Earth
- take pictures and videos from a flying camera I can control
- decide I want to eat a dish from any corner of the world and have it arrive on my doorstep, piping hot, in less than an hour
- know what the sky will look like days from now, thanks to machines that track invisible atmospheric currents from space
I've been thinking a lot lately about how little I experience wonder these days. As a kid, wonder was something I felt all the time. Every new place I visited, every new toy or gadget I received, came with days of anticipation and excitement. Now, I've already seen the glacier-carved Yosemite Valley, the ancient ruins of Petra, the concrete jungles of New York, Tokyo, and London. Even the places I haven't been, I've seen in 4k documentaries and can name countless facts about. The same goes for technology. I've used so much cool tech, built some myself, and read about all kinds from the past and present. But in the past few years, there's maybe 3 or 4 places—and about as many gadgets—that made me feel true wonder. That is pretty sad.
I'm not sure whether to attribute this to a change in me, a broader societal change triggered by the internet, or just the effects of aging. I think it's probably some combination of all three.
It's of course true that over the course of your life, you see and experience more and more things, such that each new thing is "less new" than before. The surprisal of each new experience—its information content—naturally goes down over time as your prior knowledge expands.
In the past, when people spent their entire lives in one place, new experiences were rare, so this acclimation happened quickly. You might think that with our globalized and digitized world, it would take much longer because we have access to so many more experiences than any of our ancestors ever did. But paradoxically, I think it has actually accelerated. By exposing ourselves to such a vast array of information, although it's wonderful at first, we tighten our bounds on the surprisal of new information. If your existing data points span so much of the information space, the maximum distance between any new point and an existing point (the surprisal) becomes more and more bounded. That is to say, the possible novelty of any new experience becomes increasingly constrained.
Of course, there's always new experiences and knowledge being created, and it would be pretty arrogant to think that you've really seen it all. One way to fight for more wonder is to stay on the cutting edge and constantly be learning and experiencing new things. That's what many of us try to do, but I think it's also worth stopping to smell the roses from time to time, to appreciate the wonder in ordinary things more. In the grand scheme of things, they are anything but ordinary.
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