Writer Zat Rana talks about interestingness. It's an antidote to the fixed presumptions of goals. It's the idea that the best way to create an optimum future is by working from what most interests us.
This liberates us from the tension between shoulds and seductions. It liberates us from goals that make us feel continuously inadequate and insecure in their attempt to predict an unpredictable future. We are no longer closed off to noticing new opportunities and treasures.
The future demands attention, and while focusing all of our energy on it is self-defeating, we do need to be intentional about directing some of our effort towards it as we orient ourselves in the world.
“Goals are one way to do that. They give us a way to make concrete what is otherwise uncertain so that we can make progress without losing ourselves to anxiety. The problem, however, is that they often mistake what exists to provide orientation as a thing of value in itself.
The best way out of this trap is to pursue what is interesting — to use our intuition for what it is that we find novel in this world to make the process and the goal one and the same thing; to continually update our sense of what is worth pursuing without being confined to false certainty.
Interestingness seeks out the riddle of life. It gives us a reason to turn the next page, to see the next scene, to give form to the unknown.
Feynman embodied this, but he also once said something that captures what it is that differentiates such a pursuit from mere goals and certainties:
“I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives… In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”
Goals, incorrectly, assume that we already know what it is that we want. Interestingness is more humble. It makes up its mind as it moves, slowly blowing from one thing to another, until it eventually grasps something that lies beyond prediction.”