The Flame Imperishable
Why the good life starts with a question you adore.
What might one do after achieving hard-won financial freedom and time freedom? What would await on the other side of those things? It is tricky to answer because it invites you to predict the future state of your knowledge, the future state of your interest, the future state of your curiosity. The thing is, following one’s interests can very often change those very interests, in unexpected ways, and have them supplanted by new ones. But future interests are impossible to know until you have them. One can guess but still expect to be quite wrong, and that is okay.
The past is of limited use in predicting the future. I look back on myself when I was a child. What was that child interested in outside of all the top-down, imposed structures, such as school. What was that child curious about? It’s difficult to tell because back then, and just as now, I was interested in so many things that it is quite difficult at times to even come up with a comprehensive list. For example, I wanted to be a cricketer, a great passion of mine. I wanted to be a scientist, to be a palaeontologist, to be an economist, to make video games, to be Roald Dahl and Isaac Asimov all at once.
As I see that younger version of myself, the more grateful I am to see that what was really important was that I was curious, full stop. That there was this inner need, silent but strong need to grow, to find out, to take on the more interesting aspects of the unknown. And that it was directed and channelled into lots of different things. I hope is that as life goes on, that curiosity remains the flame imperishable. In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, The Flame Imperishable was the source of all life therein.
It strikes me that time freedom and financial freedom, as hard-won and richly deserved as they can be, cannot stand by themselves as the be-all and end-all. But they are the great stepping stone to not only growing the knowledge one desires to see more of, but to grow it even faster. What makes life worth living, to my mind, is that there is some kind of knowledge that one yearns to garden and grow. That one desires to return and tap into, as deep as possible, the curiosity that one thrived on as a child. Because that curiosity is our natural, most basic drive.
You look at many of the great names who have done great things. Charles Darwin, for example, was well off, and he used his freedom to obsess over what was then one of greatest mysteries of the biosphere. He pursued it with extraordinary vigour because tt was a problem that he was in love with, as Popper would say.
I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.
- Karl Popper
Lady Ada Lovelace was a wealthy countess and was obsessed with the implications of computation to the point where she is now regarded as the first programmer. Isaac Newton spent many of his waking hours obsessing over a dazzling array of questions around not just physics, but even alchemy, as unfruitful as that particular avenue was.
One does not have to be successful at solving problems in order for all this to be worth it. Uncertainty is a fact of life, and it is baked into any creative effort we undertake. All that matters is that we seek to make knowledge grow, no matter how slowly or incrementally it may be.
Our ever-present curiosity is such a natural feeling to us that one has to go to quite a lot of effort to try and dampen it. And there are cultures and subcultures which do try to do that, by enforcing communal codes of conformity. But it is very, very difficult to put one’s curiosity into a prison and throw away the key. It will always want to get out, and will do its utmost to go about creating a key of its own. We are creativity engines, and we simply cannot run well without the fuel of curiosity.