The End of Discovery?
It is the future, and Nanofactories have accelerated our material ability to make discoveries. Yet there is a sense amongst many that with this invention we have reached “the end of discovery” – that there is nothing new worth exploring.
This is clearly not correct on two levels:
Firstly, the fact that happiness surveys continue to show lack of meaning to be a very common malaise in people’s lives means that having the entire physical universe at our fingertips hasn’t fixed everything.
Secondly, there are new discoveries happening all the time. They just don’t tend to be highlighted in mainstream news outlets. This is where we have to rely on ourselves to cultivate an ecosystem of both awareness of new discoveries, and a regular ritual to help us make our own. This won’t necessary solve an entire lack of meaning in someone’s life, but it can go a long way to making the universe feel more open and full of possibility again. A good way to go about this, I’m suggesting, is to cultivate a sense of expected discovery.
Many years ago, there was a video game which captured this sense of expected discovery well. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker placed players in a world of open ocean, dotted with islands to discover. A key feature was the map of this world being made up of a grid of squares – with each square having exactly one island to discover. This created a mechanic-tight loop of expectation and discovery. It was almost ritual:
You enter a new square knowing there is an island to find.
You discover and explore the island.
Knowing you have discovered that one island, you move on to the next grid square.
Real life is obviously a lot less uniform than that. It is very rare to know when a new discovery is coming. But this doesn’t mean we can’t create regular rituals around the process to keep things progressing and keep things engaging.
We might also make discoveries more often if we reconsider our benchmark for what constitutes a discovery. Not all islands in Wind Waker are of the same depth and quality. But more importantly, they are reliably there.
While it wouldn’t be fair to expect a revolution every time you sit down at your workbench, aiming for micro-discoveries may be more realistic, and thus, more sustainable. The aim here is to craft a routine or ritual that is endlessly repeatable.
This can look different for each person, but I am particular inspired by “Makers” throughout history who have set aside one or two days a week, outside of their “day-job”, to research or make something.
There were always two big obstacles to this schedule though. The first was actually securing time to focus on the project. This was (and still is) quite challenging to balance with other important parts of life – usually family, relationships, and general home maintenance. That’s legitimate. That regular time may be one night a week for some people. The main thing is that it is regular, and a roughly known amount of time to help scope out project size and expectations.
The second obstacle was usually an internal sense of perfectionism, or a sense that if you can only spend one day, or one night, on something, then it isn’t worth doing. This is a big problem. Think of all the discoveries that could have been if all the perfectionists in the world were willing to be a little more relaxed on the quality of the final product, but more focused on the quality of the process and ritual itself. Remember – not all islands are the same, but you know they are reliably there. Even the most ambitious and perfect inventions soon become historical dot-points. In reality, it is the larger chain of discoveries, and the chain of culture, that advances humanity.
We’ve had Nanofactories for years, and fortunately our lives are no longer filled with day jobs for financial survival. Now it is worth asking how we might craft our weeks to defy this end of discovery.