In one of the newsletters I receive to help fill my collection with internet ephemera, and help me make Bird Mail for y’all, I came across an article about where we focus our curiosity. Why aren’t we curious about the things we want to be curious about? is a question I ask myself a lot. I have explored the rabbit holes of the internet in search of the mundane and the trivial. I fall victim to the idea that though this knowledge is technically useless to me now it might be valuable to me next week or month—so I might as well read these three tabs, and watch a youtube video about it now, right? I explore many things that don’t teach me things of value, I just think I should know them, but I don’t know why.

Instagram is a sinkhole for this kind of junk food information, Tumblr used to be, and way back when I first had reliable access to a browser of my own it was StumbleUpon that stole hours and hours of my nights taking me all over the internet. They all fed my brain an endless supply of novel and mostly trivial information. I would squirrel things away in bookmarks, Pinboard, Pocket, or Instapaper thinking it would be valuable to know or come back to as reference material. Except I rarely comeback. There is too much new.

I seem to always be adding to my collection, but reviewing far less frequently. There are some things that I come back to monthly or yearly, information that becomes knowledge because of its longer term value instead of its short-term dopamine hit from learning something new. I try to include those in Bird Mail when/where they make sense. Though I will not stop looking for more information, more of that internet ephemera, that I so enjoy collection, I am now thinking more about where it comes from and its long-term value. I’m not sure if that means shifting focus to longer-form writing, or somewhere else. I’ll let you know as I figure it out.