Ephemerality and the Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

In Paul Graham’s recent essay, The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius, he posits that disinterested obsession, akin to that possessed by a bus ticket collector, is a key component for doing great work. He writes

When you look at the lives of people who’ve done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket collector’s obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most striking features of Darwin’s book about his voyage on the Beagle is the sheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seems infinite. Ditto for Ramanujan, sitting by the hour working out on his slate what happens to series.

It’s a mistake to think they were “laying the groundwork” for the discoveries they made later. There’s too much intention in that metaphor. Like bus ticket collectors, they were doing it because they liked it.

I think what rings true to me about this is the rejection of the role of top-down intentionality; the greatness of the resulting body of work is an emergent property of disinterested pursuit of what was interesting. In my experience in pursuing any kind of intellectual work, a top-down imposition of structure always seems to be relatively useless except insofar as it gets you doing something. The real structure of anything I’ve ever worked on has ultimately been revealed: it emerges from the process discovery, refinement, iteration. Certainly, I imagine this would be uncontroversial in the programming community. It is essentially waterfall (top-down) vs agile (bottom-up, emergent).

Graham goes on to say

An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extent anything can. Chance, as Pasteur said, favors the prepared mind, and if there’s one thing an obsessed mind is, it’s prepared.

And so again—serendipitously—serendipity enters the equation.

In a previous post I examined “service anxiety”—the fear of the loss of access to data controlled by web services—and argued by analogy with information overload, that to alleviate this anxiety one should relinquish control and embrace serendipity. I argued that the connection between service anxiety and information overload was ephemerality, either in the access to the services we rely on, or in the information we are bombarded with. This creates an unstable foundation—a drifting reality—on which we attempt to build the structure of our lives.

But the ephemerality runs even deeper and more literally than this:

[W]hen we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal that which we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.

• Tim Wu, paraphrasing William James, in The Attention Merchants (p. 7)

Even if you maintain a high-latency information diet—unplugging, meditating, reading old books in a cabin in the woods all day—central to your experience will still be a stream of consciousness that is constantly shifting. The experience of reading a book is in itself highly dynamic: a steady stream of words rattle through your consciousness by which you attempt to glimpse some series of structures of information from the author’s mind. All experience is constructed from a stream of ephemeral sensory input.

Do you remember everything you’ve ever read? Almost certainly not. The things that stick are those that can be fitted into the elaborate internal scaffolding of your own mind, which is itself built up through a series of structure preserving transformations mining this ephemeral stream of consciousness for the raw building materials.

If we consider the ephemeral nature of how we experience life itself, the strategy to handle service anxiety and information overload can be applied much more broadly. The key to creating coherence in the ephemeral stream that is life is to opportunistically build up this internal scaffolding, embracing the role of serendipity, and allowing an appropriate and manageable structure to emerge.

In the realm of our daily routines and behaviours this would seem to evoke Sarah Perry’s Deep Laziness.¹

In the realm of intellectual progress I think it evokes, at least in part, Paul Graham’s Bus Ticket Theory of Genius discussed above. The state of disinterested obsession is a mindset that facilitates the relinquishing of control and top-down intentionality, allowing one to embrace the following of curiosity, the serendipitous realizations of new connections, and the gradual emergence of a body of work.

Update: I’ve begun a blogchain in which I further examine some of these themes: Boredom World.