The devaluization of thought has been on my head lately. It occurred to me that on any given day, I'm probably consuming 2-5 thoughts that click with me, as if they could resonate throughout my life and I could base the entirety of my thoughts around them. One good Nautilus article. One good poem I feel the need to read out loud. A Youtube analysis video on a great movie. A song I want to become friends with. These ideas spend increasingly shorter amounts of time in my head as I encounter more of them. I yearn for that feeling I got the first week of college, when the many introductory professors had filled my mind with persuasive arguments for how their field encapsulated the entirety of human experience, and it clicked to me while sitting in a coffee shop- "Everything is connected!" I spent that week starstruck, in love with an idea and the way it danced, the way it gave space and voice to other ideas it interacted with- if an idea was a person, this "Everything is connected!" would be the kind of person who walked with gravitas, would ask questions and be genuinely inquisitive of the answers she received, would be the type of hiker who made sure to stay slightly behind the slowest person, who knew that in their head, always seeking to bring the best out of people. Over time, I've treated "Everything is connected!" terribly. I've danced with tens of thousands of other ideas and there's an embarrassment of being seen with her. She is pop poetry, and it seems as though the more I encounter, the less likely I'll ever enjoy her the same way, the longer it'll take for me to recall how it felt, the easier it'll be for me to confuse her for someone else. Just another stepping stone to bigger ideas, I guess. I never want to take that away from someone else.
Were you to give a subject the attention and care you gave it the first week of college your experience would be the same. This is why I hate "I'm so smart" Youtube videos - they give you a superficial, dishonest, clickbait-driven view of something and any greater wisdom is buried by the bullshit. You can't get an "everything is connected" sentiment out of a six minute Flash video, nor can you get it out of a thousand word Nautilus article. You have to go long-form. The master of "bullshit Youtube videos" was definitely James Burke, who did the column "Connections" in Scientific American for 30-odd years, and then three 1-hour shows for PBS. However Burke was all about showing how one thing you know well has its roots in something completely different and he uses that as a slice of history to show you a very specific thing. And that took him 2000 words, or an hour. Longform. There is no substitute.
But I am a longform.org addict. Weird question. Half a decade ago someone on reddit recommended Milan Kundera's books in a comment somewhere, saying that Life is Elsewhere is the best of the bunch. Was this you? This thread reminded me of it and I binged it. The Poet Masturbates, haha. My name is Jaron, and the main character's name is Jaromil. If it is you, well, thanks for influencing my self obsession.
Loved _Life is Elsewhere_, though it gave me something of a hyper-self-analysis problem as a young poet. I'll never forget the scene of Lermontov on the balcony. I think ultimately though, _Immortality_ became my favorite Kundera. Still haven't read _The Joke_, though, and to be honest, his oeuvre is so much cut from the same cloth that I often misremember which characters/scenes were from which novels.
2-5 per day? That sounds amazingly high to me. I don't think I find 2-5 things per month that meet your description. As an example, in a week where I particularly care about the music I listen to (which isn't most weeks), I would consider myself lucky to find a couple songs I like. "Like" seems a much lower bar to me than "become friends with". What I'm getting at is, I can't tell if we are viewing similar experiences through different perceptual lenses or if we really have vastly different experiences of day to day life. The yearning resonates with me, but the loss expressed in your third paragraph resonates with me more. It was wonderfully fun to be a young person with no virtually no preconceived world views. Everything was up for debate, and that made it possible to spin elaborate all-connecting webs. But, as I get on in life, I find myself accumulating ideas about how the world works that I believe are rational and correct, but also close doors that, in their closing cut off pieces of that all-connecting web.
I've been thinking about this comment, I promise I haven't ignored it. Mostly in regards to how I can change my lifestyle, and how I've failed to cultivate habits conducive for a healthy mind, even though I've always seen my love of learning as the main driver in my life. I'm a freelance web designer who likes reading Longform.org articles. And non-conversational podcasts. General infotainment. I also have a lot of trouble with internet compulsion. I spend at least 10 hours a day on the computer, to do 3 hours of work. Most things interest me, they contribute to one giant idea of the world that I have in my head. I think without a stable backing, I'm free to learn to a detriment, to ask questions of all of the shades. All is interesting.