Nick's Journal · Craft Decisions
Life, at least in modern times, is often best understood in seasons. Though we spend much of life now convinced of our uniqueness - and indeed, having spent decades forming relationships with people from all walks of life and across generations, I myself am a firm proponent that people do have many things that make them different from every other person - at the same time there are themes that have proven to be nearly universal.
Childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and twilight years are all areas where people seem to converge on certain pursuits, most often those of renewed discovery. For reasons I cannot pretend to understand, we seem content to spend decades at a time focused on a few chosen things, to the exclusion of everything else that exists in this massive and expansive world. And then, as one season comes to an end and another begins, we seem to pause for a period of time, to reexamine the world around us, to leverage the knowledge of others wiser (at least in appearance) to ourselves, and to make our choices once more for the next decade or two, from a fresh position.
Sometimes those choices will look very similar to the choices that came before. And other times they will look nothing like them. Who is to say why that is, for one can never really look fully into the mind of another and to know what it holds most dear and which words ring truest to them. Yet the pattern as I have described it is one that can be observed across populations and well understood as a result.
What does this have to do with novelty then? I bring it up only because it means that certain paths are very well trodden when compared to others, and one of those is that of self-development and personal growth, for there is always a market of thirty-five to forty-five year olds who are reaching that stage of their lives and voraciously consuming literature on the subject.
Depending on how deeply you delve into these subjects during your own journey, you may or may not come across observations similar to those that I will now lay out. When I go through periods of reading, I read almost obsessively, consuming a book of hundreds of pages in as little as a day as my mind seeks to absorb as much information as possible. Non-fiction in particular can be quite the minefield when one reads such as I do. Entire books often spring up around singular topics, ones that really only warrant at most a chapter in any serious book, but are stretched into hundreds of pages to justify charging one full cost for a book. It seems mercenary at first but I think it actually has a different root cause, which I will lay out below.
This quickly trains one like myself to avoid all such books and to instead focus on entire fields, and on the books which are most foundational to the field as a whole. Do not read about one narrow corner of evolutionary psychology, or human psychology, of a single religious faith, or of morality. No, instead you identify those foundational texts that encompass entire swaths of knowledge and you read them one after another. And what quickly emerges is rather enlightening.
The same text from 1820, 1870, 1920, 1970, and 2020 is remarkably similar. The language has evolved, certain modern concepts only exist in the later texts of course, but many of the most important elements, the ones that are timeless and foundational, will exist in each of them. Even more astonishing is how often topics can go back even thousands of years and still seem to demonstrate an understanding that is remarkably close to the current understanding. In fact, nothing could better demonstrate to a person the idea that an enormous amount of human knowledge is not nearly as novel as we pretend it is in modern times than diving into topics around existentialism or spiritual enlightenment.
Step outside the narrow domains of modern technology, such as computer science or the digital world, and progress is not about reinventing the wheel, but rather it is simply adding one more refinement or two, and framing it in modern language that can appeal to a current reader. It is still possible to read books that are over a hundred years old but it loses much in the translation. Go back further and the problem only compounds.
Rather than lead to me thinking less of the more recent writers, which would have seemed only natural after understanding that ninety percent of what I had just read had been written twenty years before them, and forty, and sixty, it instead made me appreciate their contributions even more. Living in the modern world, novelty has basically become weaponized to the point of being malignant. People spend countless hours of every day swiping between low information, low effort, and low value entertainment, rotting their brains so to speak. Imagine then trying to exist in that world and bring forth new ideas, actual novel information that adds to the breadth of human knowledge, but requires a depth of understanding that is immense before one can even begin to engage with it.
What an impossible task to undertake. We have become a civilization that cannot engage with our most specialized and learned minds, with economies that can never properly incentivize or reward them for the pursuit of that knowledge as we ourselves value it only in passing and only for brief periods. As artificial intelligence begins to gain in prominence, if one pays attention and listens to where it is making its strongest progress it is not in new domains. It does not yet problem solve in the way that a human might, by imagining novel solutions or ways of thinking that can often cross over dozens of domains at once. Perhaps it will one day, but that is not where I hear of the progress right now.
For now, the progress is coming from brute force, by looking at a contained space where hundreds of millions of possible iterations could explain the answer, and simply forcing its way through them. Not as simply as trying each and every one of course, often doing so in a way that eliminates huge numbers of iterations with every attempt for example, but still nonetheless basically simply doing things that humans could have solved themselves had they but the time or inclination to do so. They are essentially the tireless worker willing to spend the time and effort that humanity will never reward appropriately and so would otherwise never be achieved. And the more I see them solve these areas, the more I believe that nothing else ever could have.
Humans are simply too complicated to ever solve such things themselves. We value novelty above nearly any other factor. It is our superpower, our ability to have unrelenting curiosity that outlasts success, outlasts exhaustion, becomes obsession. We are also pattern matchers though. We find shortcuts, paths of least resistance, and efficiencies. If you can get to the same spot with social engineering, leverage and politicking as you can with years of grinding and endless tireless effort than don’t be surprised when that is where people gravitate towards. Don’t be shocked when science becomes a field of replication crisis, gatekeeping and fraud rather than one where we recognize the effort that even the smallest of progress can sometimes entail and reward it sufficiently to incentivize its achievement.
One day we might solve these puzzles in ways that better align with societal goals and with civilizational progression. Until that day though, the smartest of us will watch how reality actually unfolds and not how others claim that it does. We will watch the efforts that lead to the outcomes we desire and what they require. And we will pursue those things that provide us the freedom that we crave, to pursue that which we desire most. The next thing. The novel thing. The thing that we do not yet know or have not yet held. The thing we will hold dear for but a brief moment once we do have it, releasing it ever so quickly to make way for the next.
Much love as always,
Nick