The Lost Art of Research as Leisure - Mariam Mahmoud
kasurian.com/p/research-as-leisure
What Jamie wrote
This article serves as a reminder of the importance of reading, of curating questions in our mind, and the delight in pursuing those answers through "leisure." The importance of reading is highlighted in the article with examples from the Quran. It reminded me of a similar impact of Protestantism highlighted in The WEIRDest People in the World (one of my absolutely favorite books!) where practitioners of the faith are called to directly read the Bible, which resulted in a huge spike in literacy which also resulted in other pursuits of learning.
The article also comments on the impact of reading less on culture…
Today, we find ourselves in precisely the cultural crisis that Woolf, White, and Sontag anticipated--not a world without books, but a world where fragmented attention and superficial engagement have eroded the foundations of shared meaning and cultural coherence.
The definition of "culture" is as liquid as the phenomenon it seeks to describe. In Princes and Powers, James Baldwin observes that only a culture in crisis would ask for a definition of "culture."
We are a culture in crisis. We lack, as Byung-Chul Han articulates in The Disappearance of Rituals, the structures and forms that make meaning possible, leading to cultural fragmentation. The result is a sense of civilisational ADHD. A generational restlessness, inattentiveness, and excessive movement in no direction, with insight elusive and ephemeral.
That saying "excessive movement in no direction" is impactful. And the article suggests it really is in the pursuit of an answer to a question, not just any reading.
For some, the compulsion to read manifests as a productivity hack, or as the passive consumption of viral self-help books and novels. These readers treat reading not as a tool to discern the reality around them, but as an obligation to signal productive virtue or as mere entertainment, no different from a reality TV show.
I like that the article frames an approach to this.
- Cultivate Curiosity
- Develop a Question
- Gather Evidence
- Develop an Answer
- Community of Knowledge
What distinguishes research as leisure from idle browsing is precisely this movement toward creation. However modest, your answer must contribute to the conversation rather than merely consuming or repeating what others have said.
I'd like to think this is a small component of what I’m doing in these emails.
What is the question you are asking?