Following your curiosity, you can bring something new and beautiful into the world as a gift to others. But to go there you have to do things that others will think stupid and embarrassing.
The experience you describe matches an integration-differentiation dynamic pretty well:
1. you spent long with an open, broad, natively curious orientation. That's differentiation
2. later, doing so no longer called, showing up affectively as a lack of interest, of fun. You'd differentiated enough, discovered and absorbed enough. It needed coherence then, not more fuel. It needed integration
3. curious new interests emerge, idiosyncratic oddities that are strongly affectively compelling. Integration done or close, a new complexified mind/personality/identity/etc reaches out into the world once more, but from a new vantage point. Baby steps first
4. on the other side is a proof vacuum, the new complexified thing an isolated point mass that hasn't interfaced with the world. Cue a inhering emphasis on social validation of "interesting things" as the complexification has led somewhere new, somewhere that needs sanity-checking, social proof of ~normativity. Answers are needed for “did I go too far?”, “what did I make now, is it intelligible to others?”
5. go back to 1), do pass go, do collect $200
Both phases are necessary. Integration is clumsy and inward looking, but it's all g: unbounded differentiation spreads one too thin, diffuses the capacity for insight. Mindbody knows this
pinning this. I think that is a really interesting way of thinking about it. I do feel like 2024 was a big year of consolidation for me, filling in, checking—and then the second half was an increasing feeling of stasis. And now I feel like I'm entering another cycle. Hm!
Henrik, I love the vibe of this article. It reads like the lines of someone recovering, like when one begins to sense in the middle of winter that spring will come. Very beautiful.
Thank you for being so intellectually vulnerable. Besides the usual interestingness and the great writing, that is by far the thing that I most enjoy about these essays.
I enjoyed this piece and your honesty about this process of "self-extrication". I know that familiar feeling of tunnelling through a rabbithole led by a surge of intense curiosity and i, too, miss it sometimes when I feel far from it. This line "(y)ou can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly" reminds me of Oblique Strategies, interestingly also by Brian Eno.
This is not the first essay of yours that has led to insights! Curiousity is something which, I think, never came naturally to me - I will hang on to this idea that following interestingness is a path to curiousity. I will have to re-read and percolate. Also the concept of the “serious play” of a child. Fun play being another concept that elludes me. Thank you!
I love your honesty. It is refreshing and often moving. I re-told your story of “the third chair” to a close friend and found myself tearing up. And upon hearing the story , so did he!
This resonated a lot (another way of saying you managed to interest me!). As it happens, lately I'm very much in the mindset you described. Another hallmark of that state is a certain impatience, a resistance to slowing down and sitting with the uncertainty of not knowing if and when something might grab you, and what it is. And the loss of control that comes with this. The impulse to engineer an emotional experience can be even more pernicious than manipulating for outcomes. I'm reminded of the scene in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray briefly achieves the perfect romantic moment with his co-worker after finally being himself, but ruins it next time by desperately pantomiming the exact same repertoire of behaviors in the effort to recreate that connection.
You suggest that interestingness "is not a property of an idea; it is a cluster of emotions. You can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly." I sort of agree, but also sort of disagree (which sparked some interest - so maybe disagreement is one cue that can jolt us out of numbness). It's true you can't search for the idea in order to get to the feeling. But the idea still matters; its properties serve as an affordance for your surge of interest. To become interested in something is to appreciate what's inherently interesting about it, the way most things become inherently interesting if you look closely enough. And as you showed above, sometimes this doesn't start with an idea, but with an object or perceptual experience (like gazing at the sky).
So I don't think interestedness must only be equated with curiosity, in that purely epistemic sense of "compulsion to know." Sometimes it manifests that way. But for myself it's less about wanting to solve a mystery or the desire to know than something aesthetic, in the sense of being really cool, or interesting-in-itself.
I don't disagree with that! It is a coupling between the person and the thing that creates the "interesting." And I would probably use another word for the thing that is pleasing to me but doesn't ask me to go deeper to understand it — but that is semantics. I agree that type of thing is real and good.
Reading this felt really genuine and whole like a nice glass of water. It's nice to be reminded of the paradox, especially as I'm constantly trying to meta-rationalize something that cannot be. Thanks!
Long time listener, first time caller here. This piece tugged at my heart in an arresting and unexpected way. Especially resonated with "...until...she has walked around the earth and reentered paradise from the backdoor; until she has regained, as an adult, the serious play she has now". Gorgeous writing.
The couple of paragraphs on being ill in December also spoke to me. Having had a bit of an odd year myself, health-wise, it was deeply therapeutic to see some of those disorienting but ultimately life-affirming experiences and accompanying feelings put into words. Grateful to you for sharing!
"If my work is to ever be important, it will not be because I was successful in trying to second guess the multitude. It will be because what I found to be authentically important to me, is, or becomes, authentically important to many others."
It's so hard to stay true to that but it's oh so important. Thank you for your vulnerability and insight.
This was a good one to work on. I have many favourite elements, but the three that jumped out immediately were:
1. "So, finding the world uninteresting, I feel ungenerous in a way. I’m the blinking dot when ChatGPT fails to generate. In an important sense, I’m not alive." Really like the sentence variety and the metaphor here.
2. "fiendishly well-read." I want to use fiendishly somewhere, preferably asap.
3. "I have climbed back into Eden at times, but each morning I wake up outside again. You have to keep climbing in." Still takes the cake for me.
Hopefully, we'll get to read the odd ideas at some point, too. What could the image of transparent ice evoke? I'm curious to know.
The first one especially is so much better than the original—more specific and vivid. And fiendishly adds an unexpected color. Great choices in both cases!
Yes, the kids are so good for that. The rolling meatballs together was more important than it comes across in the essay because I had this welling up of joy at doing that with them that I think primed the thinking I did. "Why don't kids get stuck in their own nets?" Maud asked recently. Yes, indeed, why not.
The experience you describe matches an integration-differentiation dynamic pretty well:
1. you spent long with an open, broad, natively curious orientation. That's differentiation
2. later, doing so no longer called, showing up affectively as a lack of interest, of fun. You'd differentiated enough, discovered and absorbed enough. It needed coherence then, not more fuel. It needed integration
3. curious new interests emerge, idiosyncratic oddities that are strongly affectively compelling. Integration done or close, a new complexified mind/personality/identity/etc reaches out into the world once more, but from a new vantage point. Baby steps first
4. on the other side is a proof vacuum, the new complexified thing an isolated point mass that hasn't interfaced with the world. Cue a inhering emphasis on social validation of "interesting things" as the complexification has led somewhere new, somewhere that needs sanity-checking, social proof of ~normativity. Answers are needed for “did I go too far?”, “what did I make now, is it intelligible to others?”
5. go back to 1), do pass go, do collect $200
Both phases are necessary. Integration is clumsy and inward looking, but it's all g: unbounded differentiation spreads one too thin, diffuses the capacity for insight. Mindbody knows this
pinning this. I think that is a really interesting way of thinking about it. I do feel like 2024 was a big year of consolidation for me, filling in, checking—and then the second half was an increasing feeling of stasis. And now I feel like I'm entering another cycle. Hm!
Henrik, I love the vibe of this article. It reads like the lines of someone recovering, like when one begins to sense in the middle of winter that spring will come. Very beautiful.
Thank you for being so intellectually vulnerable. Besides the usual interestingness and the great writing, that is by far the thing that I most enjoy about these essays.
I enjoyed this piece and your honesty about this process of "self-extrication". I know that familiar feeling of tunnelling through a rabbithole led by a surge of intense curiosity and i, too, miss it sometimes when I feel far from it. This line "(y)ou can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly" reminds me of Oblique Strategies, interestingly also by Brian Eno.
Keep well, Henrik!
I love the phrase of self-extrication.
This is not the first essay of yours that has led to insights! Curiousity is something which, I think, never came naturally to me - I will hang on to this idea that following interestingness is a path to curiousity. I will have to re-read and percolate. Also the concept of the “serious play” of a child. Fun play being another concept that elludes me. Thank you!
I love your honesty. It is refreshing and often moving. I re-told your story of “the third chair” to a close friend and found myself tearing up. And upon hearing the story , so did he!
This resonated a lot (another way of saying you managed to interest me!). As it happens, lately I'm very much in the mindset you described. Another hallmark of that state is a certain impatience, a resistance to slowing down and sitting with the uncertainty of not knowing if and when something might grab you, and what it is. And the loss of control that comes with this. The impulse to engineer an emotional experience can be even more pernicious than manipulating for outcomes. I'm reminded of the scene in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray briefly achieves the perfect romantic moment with his co-worker after finally being himself, but ruins it next time by desperately pantomiming the exact same repertoire of behaviors in the effort to recreate that connection.
You suggest that interestingness "is not a property of an idea; it is a cluster of emotions. You can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly." I sort of agree, but also sort of disagree (which sparked some interest - so maybe disagreement is one cue that can jolt us out of numbness). It's true you can't search for the idea in order to get to the feeling. But the idea still matters; its properties serve as an affordance for your surge of interest. To become interested in something is to appreciate what's inherently interesting about it, the way most things become inherently interesting if you look closely enough. And as you showed above, sometimes this doesn't start with an idea, but with an object or perceptual experience (like gazing at the sky).
So I don't think interestedness must only be equated with curiosity, in that purely epistemic sense of "compulsion to know." Sometimes it manifests that way. But for myself it's less about wanting to solve a mystery or the desire to know than something aesthetic, in the sense of being really cool, or interesting-in-itself.
I don't disagree with that! It is a coupling between the person and the thing that creates the "interesting." And I would probably use another word for the thing that is pleasing to me but doesn't ask me to go deeper to understand it — but that is semantics. I agree that type of thing is real and good.
Reading this felt really genuine and whole like a nice glass of water. It's nice to be reminded of the paradox, especially as I'm constantly trying to meta-rationalize something that cannot be. Thanks!
❤️❤️re-entering paradise from the backdoor hits different
resonates deeply
I'm glad you wrote that so soon after I hit publish because I was sitting here feeling a little exposed haha
Long time listener, first time caller here. This piece tugged at my heart in an arresting and unexpected way. Especially resonated with "...until...she has walked around the earth and reentered paradise from the backdoor; until she has regained, as an adult, the serious play she has now". Gorgeous writing.
The couple of paragraphs on being ill in December also spoke to me. Having had a bit of an odd year myself, health-wise, it was deeply therapeutic to see some of those disorienting but ultimately life-affirming experiences and accompanying feelings put into words. Grateful to you for sharing!
thanks! this piece was so liberating to write and I've felt really creative and present since. and I hope 2025 is less odd for you healthwise :)
glad to hear it! And thank you! It’s looking that way :)
Just for the record, the Talking Heads album you are referring to is actually titled Fear OF Music. Though Fear Music would also be a good title…
thanks! lol
Your thoughts about the trap of writing for others instead of for yourself remind me of something Brian Kershisnik once wrote (https://www.kershisnik.com/w-o-r-d-s/2017/7/6/looking-for-something):
"If my work is to ever be important, it will not be because I was successful in trying to second guess the multitude. It will be because what I found to be authentically important to me, is, or becomes, authentically important to many others."
It's so hard to stay true to that but it's oh so important. Thank you for your vulnerability and insight.
Wonderful. Also: sometimes it’s hard to remember what fun is. It’s fine to lie fallow. You’ve had a big year.
This was a good one to work on. I have many favourite elements, but the three that jumped out immediately were:
1. "So, finding the world uninteresting, I feel ungenerous in a way. I’m the blinking dot when ChatGPT fails to generate. In an important sense, I’m not alive." Really like the sentence variety and the metaphor here.
2. "fiendishly well-read." I want to use fiendishly somewhere, preferably asap.
3. "I have climbed back into Eden at times, but each morning I wake up outside again. You have to keep climbing in." Still takes the cake for me.
Hopefully, we'll get to read the odd ideas at some point, too. What could the image of transparent ice evoke? I'm curious to know.
thanks for the help! 1, 2 were last minute additions after you read
The first one especially is so much better than the original—more specific and vivid. And fiendishly adds an unexpected color. Great choices in both cases!
With the kids around to remind you, you should have a source of curiosity for years to come.
You're a K to many writers here. Thanks for the inspiration.
Yes, the kids are so good for that. The rolling meatballs together was more important than it comes across in the essay because I had this welling up of joy at doing that with them that I think primed the thinking I did. "Why don't kids get stuck in their own nets?" Maud asked recently. Yes, indeed, why not.