research as leisure activity - by Celine Nguyen research as leisure activity

The novelist Kate Zambreno claims that when she is working, she often sees the same names and the same books everywhere: “I begin to make connections with everything—I see literature everywhere, a vast referentiality.”

Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary in 1933, expressed essentially the same thing: “What an odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I am writing about!”

Our brains have evolved to detect patterns and attribute significance to events that are entirely random, imagining signal where there is mostly noise. This tendency is probably hypertrophied in writers, who are constantly seeing the world in terms of narrative. In fact, for a while, encountering this very sentiment in books became yet another doub

When research is your leisure activity, you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture, econ

I truly think that autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture.

There are also people who are para-academic researchers. While there’s a lot of great computer science and human-computer interaction research happening in academia, I’ve often been disappointed by some of the actual interfaces being produced by the ivory tower. Some of the most interesting work seems to be happening outside academia.

People who read widely and attentively—and then publish the results of their reading—are also arguably performing research as a leisure activity.

it discourages a certain form of dilettantism—peering into an adjacent field that you don’t have the “right” background for, using techniques you aren’t “qualified” to be doing, introducing references and sources that are nontraditional and even looked down upon in your primary field. Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these discip

research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary .

Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts . It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now ? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—n