Death by over-recommendation

current mood: there are too many things

Art by Dall-E

Let me admit upfront that books are delicious. I want to eat as many of them as possible. Or more broadly, ideas are delicious. Arguments, stories, elegant explanations.

But there is such a thing as too much food. Even good food, even the healthiest, most nutritious, most balanced food you can find—you will die if you eat too much of it.

But we fool ourselves. If you eat more and more at some point your stomach will say, “bro wtf, calm down”. Your brain, however, has far less robust mechanisms of telling you it’s overloaded. Rather than literally vomiting, your brain will just give you this queasy feeling of overstimulation where on the one hand you want to stop but on the other hand you keep pressing the refresh button in hopes that that next tweet will be the one that awakens you out of your spellbound slumber and spontaneously moves you to get your shit together forever.

You have to spend money to get food. You don’t have to spend money to get more blog posts. People will gladly shove more blog posts and book recs down your throat. Wondering about self-help? Here’s a blog post. Having trouble with your mom? Here’s a book rec. Trying to grapple with the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing? Here’s a tweet thread that ends with a blog post that links to fifteen book recs.

I have nothing against book recs. I love book recs. But I don’t know what to do with them anymore.

Visa ✈️ NYC (Feb22–Mar13) @visakanv

current mood: there are too many things

There’s a beauty to the utter magnitude of content out there. Imagine if you could be a human back when there was zero content. Sure, exciting for a moment because finally there are no more goddamn things to add to my to-read list. But very boring after a while.

Back in my youth I looked forward to the day where I could rid myself of all worldly obligations and just read from sunrise to sunset. I have discovered that this is foolish because reading and doing nothing else is tiring and isolating (I tried). And also, your reading list will never be empty. And also, even if it were to finally become empty, you’ll actually just feel…,,, deflated and dead inside.

What do you do? This is the thing I don’t have an answer for. Or maybe I do, maybe we all do. Maybe the answer is the same as with every other domain of life with infinite options: start with where you are. What are you curious about in this moment? Pursue that. This is just a matter of getting good at listening to intuition, and not giving in to distractions every five seconds.

The problem of “there are too many things” was actually solved long ago by your perceptual systems. Do you have any idea how many molecules there are in your immediate vicinity, how many possible ways you could divide up the world into objects and categories? Sure, there have been 129,864,880 books published since Gutenberg invented the printing press. But your retina gets stabbed with 500,000,000 photons every second and it’s never complained once. It just hands over this nice coherent beautiful world canvas to your ungrateful ass over and over again.

How did the brain solve the problem of perceiving an infinitely complex world? Well it’s a long story (a few billion years long, in fact) but it happened via random variation and selection. The evolving brain didn’t have the luxury of standing back and making a systematic plan for how it was going to consume all the information available to it. It found itself enmeshed in the world and in need of an immediate solution. Its only choice: start simple, start local, make random changes, and iterate. Perception began with GOOD SMELL, APPROACH and BAD SMELL, AVOID, one after the other until you found the food you needed, and it iterated from that towards more and more complex world-modeling. Maybe you can do the same with books. Smells good, approach; smells bad, avoid.

But no, you won’t do that. You’ll make a 1000-book to-read list, spend hours combing through Amazon reviews, scrape book summaries and list the pros and cons of each, ask five of your smartest friends to give you their favorite books and compute a weighted sum based on each friend’s SAT score, before publishing the list on twitter and asking “hey who wants to meet up and start a book club together, engage with this tweet plz haha” and asking 37 people to fill in a doodle poll so everyone can meet for an hour and discuss the best categorization system to decide on which books to read, and then decide which book to read.

Or you can be like the brain. Stop asking for recs, stop adding to your “will-never-read” list, just grab the first damn book that strikes your interest and start reading.