31. Seen-It-All Syndrome 🔗

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

People think this is not true because they conflate surprisal with unpredictability. They're not the same. I can't predict a sequence of coin tosses, but almost no sequence of heads/tails would surprise me. It would take something like tosses producing pi in binary to do that

When you're a baby, surprise is a continuous state. When you're young, it comes overwhelmingly torrentially and you have to affect unflappability to seem cool. But by the time you're about 35, if you like surprise, a certain desperation to seek it out will creep into your life

Surprisal is a cognitive addiction of course, and a good one. But the hits get harder to produce. By 40, fracking surprise out of the universe turns into an advanced cognitive skill.

A naive response is "have you read all the books in the library yet?" or "have you taught yourself advanced quantum mechanics yet?" Former is plain silly. It becomes obvious fairly quickly in a reading life that humans have written 100x more books than they have things to say

The second response is trickier. Of course not all of us are genius enough to grok and appreciate surprisal hidden in depths of the advanced math of quantum mechanics and stuff. But here's the thing: demystifying a subject to drain it of surprise is FAR easier than working in it

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.

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

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 😆

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Thank you for reading my long-winded justification for my writing mostly sucking this last year 😆

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.