This is part seven of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and finding enough. Each post stands alone. See the introduction on “the mindset of more” for links to all posts in the series.
Social media and streaming subscriptions encourage us to gorge on the glut of information (Harjas Sandhu describes “hoarding type scrolling” that sounds veeeery familiar), promising that the algorithm will feed us the best. Instead of helping us practice discernment, corporate platforms offer us an all-you-can-eat buffet of candy. Yet as Olga Koutseridi writes, “low-quality info is designed to leave us craving more instead of leaving us feeling satisfied.” We keep eating and eating, but there’s nothing of substance to sustain us.
I think curiosity is innately good, and that there’s value in learning about many aspects of the world for no more reason than that it is interesting. At the same time, I have limited time and capacity for thinking — I need some sort of filter for what to read, especially as I make efforts to slow my pace. The morass of information online is what brought us algorithmic curation and now pushes genAI — but corporate algorithms encourage rage and polarization and create “curiosity ruts”, so I avoid them.
How can I create my own mental algorithm for choosing what to read?
For me, reading and blogging are interconnected; what I read influences what I write about. I’m working on flipping that around, with the goal that what I want to write about determines what I read. But how to decide what to write about, if not by what I read?
What I’m trying is using my Big Questions as a structure for curiosity, a way to practice more intentionality in what I spend my time thinking about. I’ve been working on this for a few years, but I feel like I’m getting a better handle on it now.
tl;dr I’m basically doing research projects for fun 😉
Since I started this experiment, I’ve noticed I’m less driven to read random stuff online because I’m so excited about this playful approach to reading. The carrot method — giving myself exciting things to think about — has worked way better than the stick method of deleting my feed reader from my phone so that the only thing I had to read was my Read Later app, which instead drove me to read the Bluesky and mastodon.social Discover feeds (do not recommend) in a desperate quest for novelty and news. Glad I dodged that becoming a habit 🙌
The Big Questions framing
I got the framing of Big Questions at an Oliver Burkeman workshop. I recall it as a tangential mention but it immediately sent me spinning. As simple an idea as it is to identify some key overarching questions in your life, sometimes we need to put a name to something to really get it.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff recounts advice Richard Feynman gave “to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind,” and describes favorite problems as “a curiosity engine”:
Your favorite problems form a prism that separates incoming information into a spectrum of ideas — a frame that allows you to deliberately filter distractions, direct your attention, and nurture your curiosity.
Last year, I wanted to do more self-directed writing, but it was challenging not to be reactive. This year, I’m discovering that self-guided reading is the other half of the equation.
Big questions give me a reason to seek rather than simply receive, and are broad enough to provide direction without constraint.
Turning directed curiosity into big questions
Reading towards questions gives purpose to my curiosity. Curiosity comes in two styles: receptive and directed. Receptive curiosity is openness to learning; directed curiosity is more active, and invites you deeper. Allen Pike observes that the internet primarily serves our receptive curiosity:
By occasionally picking things to go deep on, you balance out the otherwise broad information diet we all get by default by being on the internet, consuming media, and just kind of being a modern human.
My big questions coalesced out of my receptive curiosity reading; I identified my first big questions in 2023 by reflecting on what I’d been thinking and writing about and looking for overarching themes. I first listed off a bunch of smaller questions within that theme, then worked backwards to find a bigger question uniting them all. Defining these questions made me enunciate for myself exactly what it was I was wondering, a process I found helpful in itself.
Last fall, I realized that my big questions didn’t align with my main interests anymore, so I created a few new ones and retired a couple. Updating my big question pages a couple-three times a year also nudges me to notice which questions I’ve been neglecting and might like to put some attention towards, or retire.
Big questions are a self-created tool that serves my thinking, not the other way around. I don’t treat them as a boundary to my curiosity, but can expand or add to my questions when I need. The questions are big enough to keep exploring within for a year or more, still offering plenty of the novelty I crave. I think of the Big Questions as high level themes, and blog posts as a way to explore sub-questions within them.
How this changes my reading
The feed reader and beyond
I subscribe to a ton of feeds, ever-changing, which showers me in riches of information that satisfy my broad curiosity, some directly from topical blogs and some shared by cool people. Earlier this year, I reoriented the way I think of the topic-specific blogs and newsletters I follow, and moved them from my blogroll page onto my big question pages. It’s now easier for me to unfollow and refollow topical feeds as my focus shifts between questions.
I’ve also been more proactive in seeking out online articles related to my questions — I’ve been using Search My Site, Marginalia Search, and appending Reddit to DDG searches to seek out opinions and recommendations. These smaller, weirder information pools yield some intriguing results. (There are so many personal websites out there guys!)
Choosing not to read *good* online content
Marco Giancotti points out that weeding out the bad stuff isn’t the hard part of deciding what to read (emphasis mine):
Filtering out spam and slop is relatively easy with the right tools and a little thought, at least at an emotional level.
The much tougher job, I think, is giving up on things that would be good, meaningful, fulfilling, and useful in order to do things that are even more so—or, to be precise, to do things that are better aligned with what I really care about right now. The hard part is dealing with the fact that, whatever I may try, I will never get to do the vast majority of those amazing activities.
I’m of two minds here: I don’t want to ignore everything that isn’t immediately useful, but recognize that I read a lot of things that leave me with nothing more than “cool🤷♀️” (or political stuff that ties me in a knot of nerves and anger). I don’t want to fall prey to utilitarianism, reading only what has a tangible, immediate takeaway, but also find I do get more satisfaction from going deep.
Oliver Burkeman writes about accepting our finitude in Four Thousand Weeks, commenting (emphasis mine):
“Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.”
I cannot care about everything, and trying to prevents me from going deep on the things I care most about. Wendell Berry puts it: “To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance.”
Accepting my own interests
I use my Read Later app as the filter point between my shoulds and my interests; everything I encounter online and want to read gets saved there. I tag articles with key topics and themes (including “mindset of more” for articles related to this series) to let me see only articles related to my questions. When a bit of time has passed from saving the article and I am less emotionally invested, I can more easily let go of the things that I imagine “someone like me” ought to read. Looking into these “should” articles often exposes tender spots of (typically unwarranted) inadequacy, or what-if’s around choices long since made.
What this ultimately requires is self-knowledge and self-acceptance — to release our imagined selves and “navigate by aliveness.” We must not judge our own curiosities as unworthy, or torment ourselves that we ought to be different people than we are. Whatever we are interested in, however idiosyncratic, holds meaning for us, and that’s what counts.
Curating reading lists
After reading around a question for a while online, I start to get a better feel for where I should dig in to books. The internet primarily produces breadth, but books offer depth.
In the past, I would pick a single book as representative of a topic I was broadly curious about and call it good. Now, I’m going more research-style, collecting a stack of books on the same topic, knowing full well that I won’t read them all*.
I start off by browse-searching the library catalog for books related to a question that’s been niggling at me — this spring one has been: in the age of generative AI, what’s the value in craftsmanship? — and collecting potential titles into a list. Of course, I have my own answer to this question, but the meaning of making can be a tricky thing to describe, so I wanted to see how others have done so, and explore some different angles:
- What’s the value of art and craftsmanship to the creator, to the receiving audience, to society?
- How have we dealt with similar challenges to craftsmanship in the past, and how is generative AI different?
- What do artists, writers, academics, craftspeople think?
- What is craft, and how do we learn it? How is what generative AI does different than what human creators are doing?
I try to keep the lists generously open-ended — since these are library books I don’t have to pay for, I have nothing to lose from trying something a bit out there besides a bit of time. (I had been keeping a single list with all my questions crammed together but have finally taken the time to separate them out 😉) Art books, poetry, memoirs, all fair game. Celine Nguyen observes, “Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools, techniques.” I’m trying to turn my “ooh?” energy towards intriguing books than enticing online articles.
When I’m requesting books from the library (we get free holds — 25 on ebooks and I’ve never hit the limit on physical), I skim through the library list and try to think about which would be most helpful to read next based on where my thinking is now. (This is also influenced by what has a wait list.) Although I like reading fiction as an ebook, I prefer to read non-fiction in hard copy. I benefit from having a non-fiction book in sight — it’s easy for non-fiction ebooks to get pushed below the digital fold so I forget I have them borrowed — and a due date so I actually get around to reading it 😉
Although I’m reading the book or article towards a particular theme, I’ll still write down unrelated connections — if I can’t use it for the post at top of mind, it might apply to a future question or post. Despite starting off with a vague idea of the question I’m getting at, I find that my original question often shifts and becomes more compelling, and I develop new questions. I’ll write more than one blog post, and explore more than one question, based on what I’ve been reading this spring and summer.
How I’ve been choosing books to read
Here’s a demonstration of my selections across four library runs (you’ll see I’m still grabbing books for entertainment, other interests, and broad curiosity, but also focusing on a particular topic):
When writing is the point of your notes — when informing your writing is the goal behind reading — Richard Griffiths proposes that it’s most useful to “develop a concept of your intended output before you start reading a book. That way, your interests will fruitfully guide your reading and note-making.” I do this by periodically ducking into my collecting grounds (draft blog post) for a particular question and developing a starter outline of declarative statements. I organize the material I’ve already collected (initially from online readings) into those headings, then continue to read more based on the parts of my argument I’m not sold on yet, or where I don’t feel comfortable making a declarative / interesting statement.
Reading with purpose
Sometimes I like to read for the sake of reading, and sometimes I enjoy more purposeful reading. Knowing that I’m planning to write about a question changes how I read by defining my idea space. Instead of reading according to receptive curiosity, I’m using directed curiosity to seek what of the text relates to my question. It makes me pay closer attention to language that I might quote in a blog post.
When I read non-fiction, two levels of interpretation are happening in my mind at the same time: first, I am directly intaking the language and interpreting the author’s intention; at another level, I am processing it analytically and relationally, trying to understand what it means to me. Johan Hari describes it: “If you weren’t letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn’t really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book.” This is an unfocused, connective mode of thinking that uses my brain’s default mode network. I use reading non-fiction as a commitment to spend time thinking about a subject; the book itself is a tool towards that.
When I read towards a question, I concentrate my connection-making within that question space, but it remains loose. I am reading for ideas, not information per se, so the dialogue between me and the book is what matters. Roland Barthes writes, “[The text] produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.” Just as writing doesn’t only look like typing, reading doesn’t only look like rapt attention to the page. A big question offers a frame for my reading, like the viewfinder of a camera; framing is a way of sense-making.
Further reading:
How Small-Town Public Libraries Enrich the Generative Research Process by Nick Fuller Googins (LitHub)
More search, less feed by Austin Kleon
See also:
Choosing between ideas for blog posts
How I approach crafting a blog post
Shout-out to James for asking about my Big Questions last December and (eventually) prompting this!
