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.”

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

it reflects how the best software products aren’t just assemblages of functionality , exposed by particular formal elements (links, buttons, icons, menus). Rather, they organize and shape how you think, and they create or sustain a particular lifestyle:

Research requires commitment to evidence, broadly defined. In the sciences, this might involve running experiments and quantitatively analyzing the results; in the humanities, this might involve translating or transcribing primary sources and qualitatively interrogating them. (But this is oversimplifying things: the “sciences” and the “humanities”

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

• Research culminates in some output . Research isn’t just about collecting references and evidence and the ideas of other people. It isn’t even about synthesizing them in an interesting way. Research is about advancing new arguments and ideas in some form—typically a conference presentation, paper, book, etc.

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!”

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

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