Lawrence Peryer

Spend time with someone who knows a lot about a given topic. A scientist, historian, surgeon, master musician. They hedge far more than an amateur does. "I'm not sure" comes up constantly. They will spend twenty minutes on a question that someone with three months of experience answers in thirty seconds. The person who read one book about economics has a complete theory of how everything works. The person who has spent thirty years studying it knows how many things economists still don't understand.

A few years ago, I was unhappy in my job. My solution was to push for a higher salary and a bigger mandate. Within six months of successfully getting what I wanted, I was miserable in ways I had not anticipated and could not quite quantify. The work itself was challenging. Technically, everything was fine.

There is a cluster of features in human experience that recurs across cultures, millennia, and traditions that had no contact with each other. Once you start cataloguing the elements of that cluster, the consistency is oddly specific. Luminosity or overwhelming light. An initial response of terror transitioning to calm. Time behaving abnormally. Information arriving as reception rather than deduction, more download than derivation.