Obviously, this calls for another digression.

Another starting point for rabbit hole clicking is the sometimes necessary, and oftentimes exasperating, search through our mail (or other places we've saved things) looking for one thing and finding another. In order to successfully do this we have to somewhat counter-intuitively forget something. If we know precisely what it is we want to find, or perhaps more accurately, get back to, it might not even be accurate to call what we do a "search". It's more of a "find" for which we're pretty sure of the precise path. Of late, for instance, for no particularly useful purpose I've wanted to refer to the interrobang - the punctuation mark which is a cross between an exclamation mark and a question mark. I knew that it had shown up somewhere in my mail, in a correspondence with my brother, but I couldn't remember what it was called, a problem which, obviously, meant both that I couldn't find it via a search for its name, and that I needed to conduct a search for it (since if I knew what it was called I wouldn't have had to search for it - not only in my mail, but anywhere). The best I could do was send out a few feelers - a search for "exclamation mark" in mail from my brother, for instance. And it's in this way that frustration played a positive role in serendipity. Not finding it that way I widened my net by checking all my mail for "exclamation point" and stumbled onto a wonderful story about Victor Hugo which I hadn't remembered I'd saved.



Go to: The Never-ending click