The Things We No Longer Discover

Have we optimised the wonder out of our lives?

There is a particular feeling that arrives before thought.

You walk through the gates of an old house. You turn into a narrow street in a city you have never visited. You enter a garden, a hotel, a market, perhaps even an ordinary room — and before you have had time to analyse anything, something in you responds.

Yes. Here.

Nothing has happened yet. There is no memory attached to the place. No rational reason for the reaction. And yet the response can be immediate and remarkably strong.

We tend to explain this with words such as atmosphere, character or charm. But perhaps something more interesting is happening.

Perhaps what we are responding to is discovery.

And perhaps, without quite noticing, we have been designing discovery out of modern life.

The architecture of anticipation

Consider the experience of arriving at a beautiful old country house.

The building rarely gives itself to you immediately.

There may be gates first. Then a drive disappearing between trees. For a while, you see nothing. Perhaps the roofline appears through the branches. Then it disappears again.

Eventually the house reveals itself.

You enter through a doorway considerably smaller than the façade suggests. The entrance hall may be relatively restrained. You pass through a corridor or another doorway and then, suddenly, the architecture expands: a high ceiling, an extraordinary staircase, a drawing room flooded with light, enormous windows opening onto lawns and countryside.

The experience has a rhythm:

Concealment.Anticipation.Compression.Revelation.

The great architects understood something about human psychology long before we had laboratories capable of measuring our responses to environments.

We don’t merely experience buildings as objects.

We experience them as sequences.

The pleasure lies partly in not knowing exactly what comes next.

This is one reason some extraordinarily expensive modern spaces can leave us strangely unmoved.

Everything is revealed immediately.

The enormous glass entrance. The enormous lobby. The enormous chandelier. The enormous view.

It is undoubtedly impressive.

But there is nowhere for curiosity to go.

You have been shown the climax before the story has begun.

Cities that keep secrets

The same phenomenon occurs on a much larger scale.

Think of the cities people return to obsessively.

Cambridge is a wonderful example.

From one street, there may be relatively little indication of what lies behind a stone wall. Then you walk through a modest archway and an entire medieval court appears.

Another passage leads somewhere else.

A glimpse of lawn.

A chapel tower.

A doorway.

Then, unexpectedly, the river.

The city constantly alternates between hiding and revealing itself.

It makes you participate.

You have to walk.

You have to turn the corner.

You have to wonder what is behind the wall.

The city does not simply present itself for consumption.

It asks to be discovered.

And perhaps this is why places like this can remain fascinating after dozens of visits. You never quite possess them completely.

There is always another courtyard.

Another doorway.

Another view you somehow missed.

Then we invented a world in which we know everything before we arrive

Modern life has become extraordinarily efficient at eliminating uncertainty.

Before visiting a restaurant, we can examine the menu, photographs of every dish, photographs of the dining room, photographs of the bathrooms, hundreds of reviews and perhaps a video showing precisely what the entrance looks like.

Before checking into a hotel, we can virtually walk through the bedroom.

Before travelling somewhere, we can watch someone else travel there.

Before buying a house, we can reject it after scrolling through twelve photographs without ever experiencing what happens when we walk through its front door.

Before watching a film, we can discover the plot, the reviews, the audience score and whether the ending is disappointing.

Before meeting another human being, dating platforms can provide age, occupation, education, height, interests, photographs and a collection of preferences from which we are invited to decide whether that person deserves an hour of our time.

Even getting lost has become surprisingly difficult.

A blue dot tells us exactly where we are.

Another tells us exactly where we are going.

A voice tells us when to turn.

It is an extraordinary achievement.

And it is extraordinarily useful.

But there may have been a price.

We have become very good at knowing what happens next.

The market and the supermarket

Perhaps the difference is easiest to see somewhere as ordinary as buying food.

A supermarket is a triumph of predictability.

The tomatoes will be approximately the same size. The carrots have been cleaned. The apples are graded. Everything is packaged, labelled, priced and placed approximately where you expect it to be.

You arrive knowing what you need.

You find it.

You buy it.

You leave.

Efficient.

Now walk through a proper food market.

The experience is entirely different.

You don’t know whether the tomatoes will be magnificent today.

Someone has brought cherries from their garden.

Another stall has enormous bunches of dill.

There are five kinds of peppers you hadn’t planned to buy. An elderly woman is selling three things rather than three hundred because three things happen to be what grew particularly well this week.

You stop.

You smell something.

You ask a question.

You change your mind about dinner.

You arrived intending to buy ingredients.

Instead, something has happened.

The world has interrupted your plan.

That tiny interruption is more important than it appears.

Because discovery requires something we increasingly resist:

not knowing in advance.

The strange disappearance of adult wonder

Children inhabit a radically different psychological landscape.

A beetle can be an event.

A locked door can become a mystery.

A strange object discovered in a drawer can occupy an afternoon.

A path whose destination is unknown is worth following simply because nobody knows where it goes.

Adults often assume this capacity disappears because we grow older.

Perhaps it doesn’t.

Perhaps we simply become extraordinarily efficient at preventing it.

We research.

We compare.

We review.

We optimise.

We calculate.

We check.

We photograph.

We document.

We consult strangers on the internet before deciding whether our own experience is acceptable.

And gradually, the unknown becomes something to eliminate rather than something to encounter.

There is a peculiar irony here.

We have unprecedented access to the world, yet increasingly we experience that world after someone else has already explained it to us.

We arrive informed.

But perhaps we also arrive slightly robbed.

Efficiency is terrible at producing enchantment

There is nothing inherently wrong with optimisation.

If I am catching a flight, I want efficiency.

If I am undergoing surgery, I want predictability.

If I am managing money, running a business or trying to reach an appointment, I am profoundly grateful for systems that reduce uncertainty.

Efficiency is wonderful for getting things done.

But efficiency is terrible at producing enchantment.

Because enchantment requires an element of surprise.

It requires the possibility that the world might contain something you did not order.

And this distinction matters because modern culture has quietly encouraged us to apply the logic of efficiency to areas of life where efficiency may not belong.

Travel becomes an itinerary.

Food becomes ratings.

Exercise becomes data.

Leisure becomes scheduling.

Relationships become compatibility criteria.

Homes become investment metrics.

Even rest becomes something to optimise.

We start treating life as though the objective were to remove friction from it entirely.

But a frictionless life may also be a life in which very little can surprise us.

This is not an argument for chaos

There is an important distinction here.

Uncertainty is not instability.

Instability is exhausting.

Not knowing whether you can pay your bills is not romantic.

Not knowing where you will live next month is not an adventure when you desperately need security.

Living with unreliable people, precarious work or constant upheaval doesn’t produce enchantment. It consumes the psychological space required to experience it.

Security matters enormously.

But security and predictability are not identical.

Perhaps one of the great challenges of adulthood is learning to construct enough stability that we can safely allow some uncertainty back into our lives.

A secure home.

But an unexplored street.

Financial stability.

But an unplanned afternoon.

People you can depend upon.

But conversations whose destination you cannot predict.

A life with foundations — but not a script.

Leave something unseen

Perhaps we don’t need dramatic reinvention to recover this.

Perhaps the interventions should be deliberately small.

Don’t look at every photograph of the hotel before arriving.

Walk down the street you normally pass.

Enter the little gallery without researching the exhibition.

Order something occasionally without first consulting hundreds of strangers.

Visit a town without constructing a military operation disguised as an itinerary.

Leave part of the garden unexplored.

Walk through the doorway.

Buy the extraordinary tomatoes.

Talk to the person.

Turn the corner.

Allow yourself occasionally to encounter something before an algorithm has had the opportunity to explain whether you should like it.

Because perhaps the most valuable luxury in an age of unlimited information isn’t knowing more.

Perhaps it is preserving a little territory in which we don’t know yet.

There is a beautiful sentence available to us that becomes rarer as life becomes more organised.

It is not:

I planned this perfectly.

Nor:

It was exactly as the reviews described.

Nor even:

Everything went according to schedule.

It is much simpler.

I didn’t know that was going to be there.

A room beyond a doorway.

A garden behind a wall.

A conversation that lasts three hours.

A magnificent meal in a place nobody recommended.

A view discovered because we took the wrong road.

A person we nearly didn’t meet.

A life, perhaps, that does not unfold quite as we had planned.

We need stability. We need safety. We need places and people upon which we can rely.

But within those strong walls, perhaps we should leave a few doors unopened.

Because behind one of them may be something we have become far too efficient to find:

wonder.