Everything I like, I like in a specific way. For any interest of mine to be an interest of mine—maths, poetry, colour, music, philosophy—there are specific qualities that I look for, consciously or otherwise. Specific joys I find in learning, teaching, or doing, that I must find. My claim in this post is that these qualities are exactly the same at their core.
Connections hidden in plain sight
Our search for this grand link begins with the unlikely pair of murder mysteries and maths. It’s maybe not immediately clear that these two are the “same,” but think about the way a murder mystery unfolds. There’s a question that you must answer. A puzzle. You find clue after clue but can’t make any sense of it all, everything is all over the place, and then… Boom! You find the missing piece and everything fits gorgeously together; they’re both about satisfying solutions.
In speed-cubing, there’s a method of blindfolded solving called 3-style, used for quicker execution. A few months ago I tried to start learning the first half, and I was fully captivated the entire time. Why? Because through what are known as ‘commutators’, hundreds of algorithms became intuitive.
Why stop here? Cryptic crosswords, chess, programming, they all have this exact pattern.
‘Yeah okay, but surely not everything fits this strict narrative? You still have to account for all the hobbies you’re omitting—the artsy ones.’
Good question, reader. Luckily I have just the thing to get us there: Jazz theory. What’s my favourite part about Jazz? The complex harmony. The sound of a crunchy unexpected chord immediately followed by a perfect resolution—tension and release. Clarity from dissonance.
Reading poetry is exactly this. One second I’m scrunching my face at a strangely constructed sentence, then suddenly I get it and I’m marvelling like crazy (we could go on a whole tangent here about what it even means to “get” a poem, but no, let’s stay on target). It’s not just reading literature, either. Writing novels scratches this same itch; my favourite aspect of writing might just be seeing characters exist when previously they were a mess of abstract ideas. Same with writing poetry, but we’ll get back to that.
What about aesthetics?
Update “clarity” to mean beauty/purity, and suddenly you can explain things like my heavy form-over-function lean: cinematography, cover art, website themes, you get the idea. Even the styles I tend to gravitate to are about cohesion and simplicity. And this is exactly the same as the beauty of solving bug in code, or finding a brilliant combination in a chess game.
(I’d like to explore links between this and the Emmanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgement’, but unfortunately I don’t know enough about it yet; I have some reading to do!)
Even learning is attractive to me precisely because of mind-blowing epiphanies and order-to-chaos moments. The feeling of discovering more about the world, the mind, myself, or humanity, is exactly the same as everything we’ve covered so far.
Let’s consider some of the things I don’t like about some of my hobbies. One thing I find frustrating when planning for a novel is the fact that until very late in the process, it’s impossible to reconcile aspects like theme, character and symbolism into a cohesive substance. With biology it’s the memorisation of arbitrary terms. Maths it’s computation. Computer Science? hardware, low-level languages, and Rust. speed-cubing: OLLs. Web Design: backend.
Hopefully you’re seeing a pattern. The things I dislike most are things that deprive me of my MO. I don’t avoid dissonance outright; In fact, I seem to welcome it, but only if it resolves in a way that makes the wait worth it.
Small Representatives
Consider what this post is: an attempt to unify disparate ideas. That sounds a lot like Group Theory. That sounds a lot like Object-oriented programming. That sounds a lot like abstraction.
I found this excerpt from my notes, written on the 24th of October last year:
…Poetry is the opposite of maths, and in a beautiful way too. Where maths seeks generalisation and abstraction, poetry actually lets readers do that for themselves. The “great paradox of poetry” is that in being incredibly specific about things, we actually let readers relate far more than if we tried to be vague to reach more. That’s a poorly worded sentence…
I think I was mostly right here (certainly about the quality of my writing, lol), but what I didn’t see then is that reaching a wide range of experiences with a single specific image is abstraction, just in a different outfit.
Final Thoughts
One cool consequence of all this is that now I have a strong way to predict what fields will last as interests and which will just be “appreciation.” For example, politics and history are areas I will probably never be fully invested in, because they don’t fully fit my core thread. Aspects of history, politics, ethics, etc, can be interesting to me, but they will never take the heightened role of fields like arts, some sciences, maths, etc. In fact, the longevity of a hobby can be described fully by referring to it’s closeness to my model. In other words, an interest is exactly as strong and long-lasting as it is aligned with the beauty-from-dissonance ideal.
Another amazing thing—maybe the most amazing thing about this theory—is that we’re all different, and so what unites all my interests probably doesn’t unite yours. What you love or hate about politics or gardening doesn’t have to fit my model in the slightest. In fact, even my own model is just an approximation of the inexpressibly complex reality of personality.