Living Questions and Living with Wonder

I'd like to propose that there are at least two major kinds of wonder: short-term wonder and long-term wonder. Both kinds of wonder have value for a healthy brain. When wonder is healthy, it is a collection of questions in your head that interest you. When wonder is unhealthy, it is not much greater than mere information.

Short-term wonder means finding peace with not knowing something. This peace is relaxation for the creative "muscle" in your mind that can imagine things and feel curious. It is so tempting to know an answer to any question right away, which is how the internet became a place of great interest to humans. This collective activity does harm to your capacity for short-term wonder. It's as if that creative "muscle" has a spasm or clenches, quick twitches to whatever answer. Too much of this, and it atrophies.

A healthy short-term wonder sounds like this:

• "Hmm."
• "Interesting!"
• "How does that work?"

An unhealthy short-term wonder sounds like this:

• "Oh."
• "Meh."
• [No reaction at all]

"Oh," meaning, "There's the answer." Without having time and space to wonder beforehand, an answer provided is mostly just a hit of dopamine. There was no emotional investment in the journey to find an answer. You know how they say, "The value is in the journey, not the destination"? There's a creative, emotional journey that accompanies short-term wonder. A question has been presented and it does not immediately have an answer. What does the path look like and feel like to find an answer? The journey there makes you feel relief in reaching your destination. In physical space, the ability to teleport means the loss of purpose in being in any particular place at any particular time. (The automotive companies would never allow for teleportation, because they want your physical journey to be the definition of your emotional journey.) In emotional space, an instant answer is the same as teleportation.

Exercise 1: Can you see why LLMs are overall a bad idea for human brains? 

Long-term wonder means living with questions for a while. Any time a question is not answered by the time you fall asleep and then wake up again, it's long-term wonder. It means carrying with you uncertainty, which Alan Watts thinks is wise. "I don't know" is the most humble thing to say. If we spend too much time asserting what we know, but never admitting what we don't know, we actively harm our capacity for long-term wonder. 

A healthy long-term wonder sounds like this:

• "I wonder what I'll be when I grow up." 
• "What are my hobbies?"

An unhealthy long-term wonder sounds like this:

• "I told you so."
• "I'm no good at [particular craft or skill]."
• "Of course it's bad."

I live with the notion that there is no inherent meaning to anything, but life is worth living, because it's the only thing we really have. This is sometimes called Absurdism. This presents something like the unclear moods and plot in a movie by Hayao Miyazaki. You could also read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, but please stay humble afterward. I find this outlook predisposes me to ask a lot of questions. If there is no baseline meaning to anything, then I must ask questions, because I want to understand what's in front of me. There are structures of information all over the place, but information isn't understanding. What information is pieced together in your head as understanding? How is it pieced together as understanding? This outlook produces plenty of short-term questions throughout the course of a day, and several long-term questions that can't be answered by the time I fall asleep and wake up again. We can think of understanding as a journey traveled in emotional space. We can think of wisdom as a life well lived with understanding and questions still unanswered.

There is an absurd amount of interest placed on physical health. So much so that I think it gets in the way of mental health, and also emotional health. Emotional health can mean living with emotions and questions. You can't spell "emotion" without "motion", and motion is required for a journey. When we are emotionally healthy, we can see each emotion as an experience and a journey that has a start and a finish. A bad mood is more like a thunderstorm than some kind of branded personality trait. A good mood is a sunny day in the park.

I recommend trying to connect with wonder. One way to do that is to limit your access to information. Our brains get easily overloaded with information. Too much of it, like too much sugar, makes us sick. When we have space and time to connect limited information in our own heads, asking questions about it, we synthesize understanding in our minds. When we don't have that space and time, the excess information gives us a jolt in our emotional "bloodstream" but we aren't building any healthy "muscles". A common refrain these days is something like, "Touch grass." You could just go outside and touch grass then go back inside right away, and you would fail the task. The point is there is no point. Nothingness, the absolute truth. You may as well fart around. Maybe you'll learn something along the way.

Exercise 2: Go on a walk with no destination. Decide how much time you'll walk along a path forth and back, in a way that fits your schedule, and go do it. Enjoy.