San Francisco taught me not to expect much seasonality, but I’ve become better at projecting it. Here, October is the warmest month of the year after September, and yet I can feel the fall season. Fall has that kind of in-between energy in anticipation of something that soothes me. To me, that something is novelty.
The last book I read, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, argues against the myth of the objective. As a society, we’ve been taught to operate through objectives (think of New Year’s resolutions). I found a paradox in it: the greatest accomplishments often come unexpectedly, yet the path toward them requires strategic vision, which in itself is a kind of objective. I prefer to call it strategic direction. I want to ask myself:
Am I optimizing for the right thing?
Objectives often work as starting points, but rarely as end goals. We need what the book calls stepping stones toward ambitious achievements, as sometimes a fixed objective can act as a false compass.
AI-generated images are a good example. When I want a visual for one of my poems, the image I end up selecting comes after countless generations, and yet it wouldn’t exist without everything that came before. When I generate, my objective isn’t to create a precise composition, but to see something novel, something I couldn’t have described in advance, that surprises and moves me.
I optimize for novelty when I search, and for emotional resonance when I choose.
It’s not about going through life in disarray. It’s about being excited to unveil what’s next, and being in love with the anticipation of a discovery.
Maybe that’s why I like this time of year.