If you're reasonably open to experience, intelligent, and good at pattern matching, you'll arrive at a "seen it all" plateau by about age 35-50. It won't be true, but it will feel like it. Genuine, category/pattern busting surprise is harder to find past a point in our universe
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What WILL help is to blow up things where you think you already know it all and find ways to go all fumbling and awkward again. So our notional pianist has to find a way to be a fumbling beginner *at the piano* again.
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Self-disruption basically. Trying to inject novelty into your life by learning unrelated new things is like trying to do 3 undergraduate degrees instead of 1 PhD. A series of degrees is a scripted series of self-disruptions. MS mind disrupts BS mind. PhD mind disrupts MS mind.
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Doesn't work very well, but the more informal, less scripted version of developing a sense for when you've plateaued in some activity and blowing it up at the right time, to make it new again, but WITHOUT losing the experience earned... that's the real skill of surprise-seeking
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Thank you for reading my long-winded justification for my writing mostly sucking this last year
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Addendum: there is a big element of surrender in accessing surprisal latent in the universe, and it becomes harder to surrender with age because we become addicted to agency. Even when risks are low, we resist. Kids surprise more easily because they surrender more easily.
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This rambling and serious thread has many useful/interesting thoughts. One pitfall in applying the pianist-tennis analogy is premature caving in to compartments 1/
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Many reasons to explore boldly before accepting and surrendering to assigned categories and labels of "fields" and specialization paths 2/
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