Good pop science/math that is decently challenging can demystify a subject for you without giving you the mastery. And a taste of mastery is enough to tell you that there isn't as much surprise there as you might think.
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The illusion of having "seen it all" is like the illusion of having found a "formula" for prime numbers that works up to some point. Of course the number of primes is infinite, but you can convince yourself you've seen them all if the next one is too far away for you to count to
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Half of all meditation techniques are about regaining the easy-to-surprise beginner mind so ordinary magic of life can surprise in delight you again. The other half of meditation techniques are to console yourself because the first half doesn't work as well as advertised
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But "beginner mind" idea is right in essence. Except you have to generate the surprise within yourself. Thanks to our enormous capacities for denial etc. some of the deepest reserves for mystery and surprise are within you. You just have to be willing to look foolish to tap them
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People dimly recognize this and try to pick up new skills and brave early-learning-curve awkwardness as a way to inject freshness into life again. That's not quite right. If you're an advanced pianist, fumbling at tennis won't really help rediscover the surprisability of age 9.
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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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Replying to @vgr
Not sure how this fits, but writing poetry has become sort of a surprise-generating enterprise for me. I’ve taught myself to start with a minimal seed and write intuitively from that. The result: if I read something I wrote 4-6 weeks ago, I often find it surreally unfamiliar
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Poetry is like coding in assembly. Forces you to work with an instruction set right next to the hardware of life.
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