It was 10pm in NYC and I was catching up with a close friend in a trendy cocktail bar in the midst of midtown Manhattan. Before me sat a menu of a dozen specialty cocktails, and one line caught my eye: notes of mushroom, umami, honey, soymilk, and sesame. Interesting. I’ll take that. My friend quickly scanned the menu, hesitated, then turned to the bartender, “Could you just make me a classic margarita?”.
It's not the first time I’d noticed the pattern. This friend returns to the same restaurants, rewatches the same movies, and listens to the same few artists. She has favorite authors, favorite neighborhoods, and a settled aesthetic. She firmly sticks within those categories rather than testing outside them, and she was typically content with her choices.
I am the opposite. I'll order the weird dish for no better reason than that it sounds strange, listen to five genres of music in one day, cycle through intense hobby phases, and go out of my way to find the obscure experience over the familiar one. Sometimes I'm rewarded with extreme delight, but more often I am left with a sense of well… that was interesting.
Exploration vs Exploitation
This is really a matter of exploration versus exploitation, and it is interesting to me because it is fundamentally a psychological problem. Does one choose to try new things and step outside their comfort zone, or should they stick with what is tried and true? My friend and I sit at opposing ends of the spectrum, and it tracks even on paper - while she scored relatively low on the openness-to-experience trait in the Big Five, mine is maxed out.
What I hadn't realized until recently is how much this one trait correlates with everything else with how I move about life. I have a large appetite for risk, I am constantly seeking novel experiences, and I have an intense curiosity to understand reality from different angles outside what I’m used to.
Risk
My father is an adrenaline junkie. He spends way too much time kitesurfing, paragliding, and doing high-risk activities for a 68 year old man. A few years earlier, he enjoyed gambling and played a lot of blackjack, but quit for the most part after he became Buddhist (fun fact: he was banned from several casinos for card-counting lmao). His entire spiel to me and my sister growing up was: be courageous, take risks, and step outside your comfort zone.
Well, we listened and are now co-founding a startup together, where the odds of failure are close to 90%. I personally think those odds are justified by 1) the freedom to experiment with our own novel ideas that would have otherwise been impossible to do in some corporate 9-5 and 2) the fact that if successful, the upside is uncapped. If it fails, then worse case we seek out external employment to save up then try again.
Novel Experiences
If two paths diverge and I have no information other than that one is something I’ve already experienced and the other is something I haven’t (assuming I won’t die or suffer too much), I will always choose the latter. It would suck if the first path was the best day I had in Hawaii, and the second was being stuck in an elevator for 24 hours. But imagine what a funny story and experience that would be. If I had lived through that, I would be much more tolerant of sitting through long boring lectures, or a delayed flight, or a bad date. It builds resilience. Generally speaking, I aim to maximize the cardinality of the set of things I have experienced, rather than the sum of their utilities (subject to some lower bound on suffering).
Epistemic Curiosity
I think an underlying theme is a thirst for understanding and experiencing all aspects of life. I want to experience a radically different way of perceiving or conceptualizing reality. It's about getting a lens on reality that I couldn't have built on my own in isolation. This is why I like to surround myself with people who have unique modes of thinking with esoteric or contrarian opinions. I have a strong sense of what is rational or not so I am selective with what sticks, but I am still very much drawn to experiences that perturb the boundaries of my own perspectives. It shouldn’t be too surprising then, that I am an advocate for psychedelics when used responsibly.
Risks (unironically)
Clearly there are some pitfalls to these traits. If you pair high openness with weak self-regulation, it can get dangerous. Repeatedly chasing new thrills over stability becomes damaging in areas of life that require consistency to work, and one can become a dopamine-maxxing addict that chooses sensations over judgement at all costs.
Indecisiveness is another issue. People low in openness tend to prefer tradition and routine, they have preconceived anchors and know what they want. On the other end of the spectrum, people with high-openness may like to keep doors open, and then need to face decisions about which room to walk into.
When it comes to a career, it can also hinder focus and prevent one from becoming a domain expert in one subject. This is actually one area in my life that I could improve in because I would have interests in many subjects at once but never achieve mastery in one. This was one of the reasons I decided not to do a PhD because I assumed I probably would’ve been a mediocre research scientist, previously mentioned here . I’ve always admired those who can stick to one niche subject over prolonged periods of time, and I myself have never really resonated with that.
Ending Thoughts
I don’t think experience-maxxing is necessarily a better way to live. My friend probably has a higher hit rate than I do. She goes to the restaurants she likes, reads books she enjoys, spends time in environments that make her happy, and she exploits that knowledge efficiently. I willingly pay an exploration tax. I eat worse meals, meet people I never see again, and occasionally end up somewhere wondering why I thought this was a good idea in the first place. But I think I am okay with that at this stage in my life.
There are different things one can optimize for: comfort, stability, depth, etc. I seem to place an unusually large coefficient on range. I want to know what is out there, and I want my internal model of the world trained on as strange and varied a dataset as possible. Of course eventually, exploration has to cash out on something. Some restaurants are worth returning to, some people are worth choosing repeatedly, and some ideas deserve ten years instead of ten weeks. Perhaps the goal is not to explore forever, but to remain reluctant to collapse the possibility of space too early. Until then I’ll keep sampling.
Anyways the mushroom-soymilk-sesame cocktail was terrible.