Last month, I started editing Wikipedia articles. I don’t know why. Certainly it wasn’t because I had a surplus of free time. I just recently had to start waking up two hours earlier so I could taste daylight again. But I’ve been finding cracks of time that I could jam this into.
There is a hunger there that I don’t really understand. I don’t feel right if I don’t run. Two books a week or I’m stagnating. Nothing is better than mulling some big, macro idea over–picking at it until it crumbles into understanding. Then translating it, explaining it and applying it. I’ve been doing that with Wikipedia pages, connecting articles and creating news ones based on my research. It’s awesome and I am so much better at articulating what was nebulous before.
The False-Consensus Bias (which I happen to have edited) is the assumption that everyone thinks like us. That there is this sort of hovering agreement between whatever we are and what society happens to believe. I don’t have any illusions about this. Clearly, it is not normal. It’s almost pathologically weird.
I can’t teach you how to have that. I certainly can’t give it to you. But I would encourage you to find whatever that is for you and chase it. I have no idea why I am the way I am. Maybe there is some big hole that I’m trying to fill and I’ll never be able to. If there is, I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, that power and energy is working for me. And editing articles facilitates that. If you’re like me, it could work for you too. On a larger plane though, the effort should always be to find the rabbit holes to fall into, to channel those forces into something productive and see where it takes you.
Or, I guess there is always this alternative: “I sort of like arguing, maybe I’ll be a lawyer.”
