Explorer Mindset - In a world where algorithms decide what we see, how can we rediscover the joy of unexpected discoveries?
If you feel trapped in a narrow view point, surrounded by the veil, and lack of creation muse, this article is for you.
If you feel trapped in a narrow view point, surrounded by the veil, and lack of creation muse, this article is for you.
We once felt the freshness of this world, like a gentle breeze in spring, constantly blowing as we explored the boundaries of our experience like little children. We touched what seemed funny, smelled what seemed interesting, and played with what felt amazing, running around as if there were no limitations.
That was the moment we were closest to our ancient ancestors, those hunter-gatherers. But gradually, that glimmer of freshness began to fade away. We became trapped in specialized jobs, covered by a digital veil.
Picture a cozy afternoon, lingering in a quiet library, aimlessly searching for something, and accidentally finding a book that changes your perspective. Imagine hiking in a remote mountain, stumbling upon an unknown trail, and discovering an extraordinary view at the end. Think of having a coffee chat with a stranger and realizing you two share similar habits and ambitions. These serendipitous experiences are becoming less common in the internet era. It's hard to quantify, but you can feel it.
Compared to our ancestors, those hunter-gatherers, we live in a much safer, more abundant, and seemingly activity-rich era. While they needed to worry about life-and-death food shortages, we worry about what to do on the weekend. But don't underestimate the happiness and richness of their lives. As anthropologist Marshall Sahlins proclaimed, hunter-gatherers were the "original affluent society."1 They weren't burdened by the invention of time or a society built for specialization. They followed nature's rhythm, constantly moving through varied terrain to search and explore.
Modern humans have gone through a series of transformations from hunter-gatherer and agricultural lifestyles to today's global economy. For me, the most significant loss is the shift from exploration to fixation. We are no longer exploring new things, territories, or ideas every day. Society has formed an "education to specialization funnel" to create specialists, shaped by financial incentives. Even today, this system persists. The strongest evidence is when people ask about personal development, they inquire, "What are the 10 most wanted jobs in 10 years?" They want a firm destination instead of seeking and exploring.
Even when we do explore, we now heavily rely on visual stimuli and lack other sensations. We've lost many crucial aspects in our daily lives and feel it unnecessary to pay attention to them. We focus on our phones, immersed in messages, short videos, and other information, even during exploration.
We are limited to using few sensations; our view is specialized and tunneled. This is dangerous. In the book "Range," author David Epstein mentions that we all suffer from our insider view. The more we know about one specific field's details, the more likely we are to make wrong estimations. This happens to movie makers, venture capitalists, and infrastructure specialists and many other specialists.2
This tendency endangers us in a future that is becoming increasingly complex, while the mindset we embody still values a firm, specialized path. This becomes even worse with social media, search engines, and the rise of AI tools.
The problem - we want the answer as fast as possible
Instant gratification is a concept frequently discussed in the realm of social media addiction and its harm to our children. It creates a biochemical feedback loop by giving users what they want in seconds, inducing them to stay on these platforms to maximize profitability.
While this concept is relatively new, we seldom discuss other technological advancements in this context. However, I would argue that our search engines and the emerging AI tools are doing the same thing to our brains, potentially harming us in the long run if not used properly.
The shadow of search engine
Our internet is a vast, tremendous space that no single human can fully comprehend, let alone navigate to find specific information. In the past, we had to search for information in libraries, lingering between different media like books, newspapers, and photos - a time-consuming process. The internet and the birth of search engines greatly improved this situation. We now feel connected to hundreds of thousands of pieces of information within seconds, freely provided to anyone with internet access. This is unprecedented in human history and undoubtedly one of our society's greatest achievements.
However, search engines also cast a shadow. We input keywords, the search engine lists possible results, and we arbitrarily believe that the websites on the first pages contain all the information we need. People seldom go to the second page, let alone the thousands that follow.3 On average, it takes people only 14.6 seconds to click a search result, with over 50% clicking within 9 seconds.4
This creates a tendency to expect "The Answer" to come as quickly as possible. While this often applies to our daily lives, it's not the case for bigger questions and explorations. This tendency can harm our patience and ability to engage with more complex topics.
The Rise of AI Tools
AI tools enhance this tendency even further. Take Perplexity, for example, an AI tool aimed at advancing search engines. It not only lists pages related to your keywords but also digests their content to provide a short summary with citations as footnotes for further exploration.
I must admit that using it to replace regular search engines is nearly a no-brainer for me. It's quick, as accurate as a search engine, and takes less than 5 seconds to generate an answer. This kind of smoothness is addictive.
All these tendencies create a strong feedback loop: we try to get something as fast as possible. With search engines, it's results; with AI tools, it's insights. The latter is far more dangerous, as it can make us impatient to think and reason through hard questions to find our own solutions.
This heavy addiction to "Instant Gratification" can cause more harm than good in the long run. As a result, we suffer from impatience, thinking everything is easier to get and achieve. We might lose interest in explorations that require significant time without clear goals or defined paths. Serendipitous experiences become increasingly rare, leaving us with speed but also staleness.
In my view, this instant gratification is far more dangerous than a lack of speed.
A small experiment we made
I've been there for quite a long time. Around 2023, after the exhaustion of the pandemic, I began to feel my life was stuck. Everything looked and felt the same; my personal growth had stalled, and I couldn't even properly recognize it. Everything was moving very fast as usual - the environment, the industry, the technology landscape. There were hundreds of new developments happening month after month, and I felt pushed by it all.
It wasn't until one quiet night that I took a deep breath and told my partner I was struggling to find meaningful advancement.
She listened, thought for a while, and then said, "Hey, how about we go to a bookstore once a month, starting this week? The goal is to pick up a book we find interesting, stay in the bookstore for at least an hour, and then share our findings with each other."
At first, I didn't find this idea very attractive. I already read many books and didn't think reading more was what I was lacking. But my second thought was, "Why not?" I enjoy reading, and it would only take an hour per month - it wouldn't hurt too much. So I agreed.
In that hour of exploration, we didn't have a clear goal in mind. We just explored the bookstore, jumping between different categories and settling on books that caught our attention randomly. I remember reading a book about mushrooms and how their ecosystem could connect back to our society's structure, a book about consistent stock buying, and multiple novels - fantasy, sci-fi, and other genres. There seemed to be no end to the exploration; the whole bookstore was like a giant vault filled with gold we hadn't known how to appreciate before.
It took about half a year for the benefits to kick in, or rather, for me to recognize that something was different, evolving. I began to have more ideas about what to write, and many connections between different patterns and categories started to form. The whole ConnectingDots project was born after we embarked on this exploration.
The Explorer Mindset
Later on, I began to think deeper about this experience, trying to figure out what made a difference this time. Then I rediscovered a ritual I had shared with my father for several years. There is a yearly book festival in Taipei that gathers hundreds of publishers from Taiwan. Nearly all of them bring their books to the festival and display them in stalls. Hundreds of thousands of books fill that stadium, making it 100 times bigger than any bookstore in Taiwan. This was in an era before online bookstores existed.
Each year, we would visit that festival with one rule: there was no spending limit. We could buy as many books as we could carry.
We would spend the whole day there, even eating our lunch in the stadium, just reading books we found interesting and buying those we really wanted to finish. It was an exploration that took time and effort. We didn't have an end goal, nor did we have an instant search system or an intelligent chatbot to help us find the book that best suited our needs. We had to walk by, read the book's outline, continue reading if it was interesting, and then decide whether to buy it.
It took time and effort, but it was filled with joy, even though sometimes we would fail to buy the book we wanted, or the book wasn't as good as we initially imagined since there were no recommendations or other readers' comments back then. But the experience itself already served its purpose. The books we browsed, the pages we read through, all became tiny inspirations during the process, leading us to deeper connections built by ourselves, not by any kind of algorithm.
We summoned our ancestors' hunter-gatherer instinct in those moments.
I call it "The Explorer Mindset."
The Ingredients of the Explorer Mindset
The explorer mindset is a metaphor that can be crafted by anyone who resonates with it. I'll share my ingredients here for your inspiration, but I strongly recommend that you pause here and think for about 3 minutes about what your ingredients would be, based on your experience.
The explorer values long-form exploration over short-term gratification
This is the first and most important ingredient in my mind. Explorers understand that to correctly cultivate pleasure in finding, they need to have patience with the journey itself. They treat every instant gratification as a distraction. Distractions are not necessarily evil; you can still use them as temporary solutions to ease the pain of exploration. But explorers know deeply that this isn't going to work long-term. All they have to do is focus on the exploration, do deep work, and move on.
The explorer enjoys every bit of discovery along the way
The exploration already serves its purpose, although not fully, since we still need motivation from the treasure. But the explorer understands that every bit of the journey has the same value as the finding. They understand this through experience, by thinking deeply and broadly connecting to all things, people, and events along the way.
The explorer deliberately looks for serendipitous experiences or puts themselves in situations that can increase the possibility of finding them
During the journey, the explorer understands that serendipitous experiences not only can increase their chance of reaching the final goal but also infuse unexpected joy into the journey. These experiences might become the inspiration for the next adventure.
Example: New Experience per Month Experiment
Embodying the explorer mindset is not limited to travel, book hunting, or any specific experience. Since it's just a mindset, you can apply it to all activities. When surfing the internet, finding information for what you're trying to figure out, be careful of the instant answers given by search engines or AI tools. Look deeper into the references and links, even try to look at other media like books, videos, and documentaries. Don't forget to take note of every bit of your finding along the way. Record it in any form you like or even share it with others to let the community increase your chance of encountering serendipitous experiences. (My DM is always open for your exploration.)
Tell me more about your exploration
If you want a more subtle, experimental system, I can share one of the experiments my partner and I have been conducting for nearly three years.
We have a monthly ritual goal. We call it "New Experience per Month."
Every month, not limited to a specific date, we pick one experience that we haven't shared before and experience it fully. Sometimes the experience will be something small like "First time running in the morning together" or big like "First time traveling abroad together." The scale doesn't matter; what matters is the will to try new things together and cultivate the whole exploration as a long-term, infinite goal.
For us, it has become one of the most important events every month that we won't miss, even after almost three years. We still look forward to it. It's an exploration with no fixed end or direction. We treasure every bit of it and record the details in our diary. For me, that is the total embodiment of the explorer mindset.
Try it!
You might ask what the explorer mindset offers. What are the benefits, since I didn't directly mention them in this essay? I think that is the essence of this mindset: you need to try it yourself before you can fully understand its benefits.
Try the explorer mindset, explore it, and feel every bit along the way.
"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list." - Susan Sontag
Let us explore.
Thanks
Thanks Jonathan, Jimmy, Lucy, Shaka for reading the draft of this article. I can not make this far without your help.
Epstein, D. (2019). Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. United Kingdom: Pan Macmillan.