Losing serendipity

Why stumble when you can look it up?

It’s not simply the extraordinary efficiency of this sort that makes it important. It also represents a different expectation of how the world works.

There’s no place to go look up what to do with that insight, so we’ll have to figure it out as we go.

This reminds me of Bob Ross and happy accidents. Sometimes I make mistakes in my design. My hand slips, my cursor jumps, and I put something where I didn’t expect. The result surprises me. Most of the time it doesn’t mean anything, but occassionally I go with the change, tweak it, modify it.

The world used offer up copious amounts of serendipity.

This reminds me of dining room discussions as a child. We’d debate historical facts, or science facts. We didn’t have an easy way of looking up the answer, but the conversations themselves lent toward discovery and learning.

Now I can look up any answer in a heartbeat—and I do. I love that data is available, but I don’t want to lose the opportunities for finding the unknown, stumbling across something I wouldn’t find otherwise.

This is why Reddit has held my interest for so long. People sharing crazy things that I wouldn’t know otherwise.

We’re not going back to a pre-directory world. But maybe we can find new avenues toward serendipity.

Via Seth Godin.