Something from my travels

London (2024): The internet can never make me hate this melting pot

The Hidden Things

There’s a line someone shared recently which made me pause for a minute. It’s in Proverbs 25:2:

“It is the glory of God to conceal a thing; but the honour of kings to search out a matter.”

There’s something here about why certain knowledge resists easy acquisition. And why truths reveal.

Have you ever been in a situation where you got an answer immediately without having to dig for it? It’s becoming increasingly common with AI, but our desire for knowledge within reach has been accelerating for centuries.

New knowledge falling into your lap can feel great when you don’t expect it - but becomes vapid and transient once you do. If anything, quickly become; mysteries that are slow to unfurl.

Research is like this. Relationships are like this. It’s easy to feel foiled when something doesn’t click immediately.

But think about the reverse. Do you remember the sensation of mulling through a tough problem until it cracks open? Of searching for a thought or emotion, sifting your soul, wracking your brain, searching your shelves, until it became clear?

It’s euphoric in contrast. But the magic goes deeper than the surface revelation. Hard-won revelations actually improve you in the process.

How many things do you learn, recall, encounter, discover, when trying to understand why your partner has a different opinion on something than you? Or when you’re trying to find a particular note or old journal entry?

How well do you come to understand Microsoft Excel when you have to test a few different buttons and functions until it finally works the way you need it to?

The things you bump into along the way enrich you—both at the time and in the future—unless you’re too addled by annoyance to notice the treasures along the way.

The treasures of the hard path

There’s a depth of resonance which doesn’t exist on the easy path - where the answers are waiting for you to stumble into them. The depth comes from the scaffolding of mental connections you build while digging. If you navigate the territory on your way to finding treasure, you’ll know the lay of the land. You can find the same reward again in future, and have hints about many others.

I once lived in a house, not too far from my current one, and within 5 minutes walk of a train station. Every day I walked straight to the train station for my commute. And straight to the store for my shop. Straight to the gym to work out. Everything was quick, precise, and within reach.

It was only during the COVID pandemic, when I had no work to commute to, that I finally decided to explore my area. And suddenly the world opened up to me. I found shortcuts. Other stores. New parks. Strange quirks. Beautiful trees and rambling woods. It’s only when I gave myself that I could better understand my area and make more informed decisions. One such decision was to move closer to the areas I enjoyed walking in more – and I reaped the benefits for many years afterward.

The ease of difficult things

When you have to search out a matter, you encounter adjacent concepts. You stumble across related questions you didn’t know to ask. You build mental models that can accommodate new information. The seeking itself creates the capacity to understand what you eventually find.

Renaissance courtiers practiced sprezzatura – the art of making difficult things appear effortless. But the concealment was the point. The visible ease only impressed because observers sensed, without quite seeing, the extraordinary effort beneath. If the effort were visible, the effect would vanish.

The charm of a person who can recall beautiful poems and plays from memory is understanding the devotion which grounds such easy recollection.

This cuts against our instinct to make everything accessible, to remove friction, and to optimise for ease of consumption. Sometimes friction is where the value lives.

“Often, difficulty isn’t blocking you from an insight – it’s what creates the conditions necessary to receive it.”

Think about learning a language through immersion versus through translation apps. The app gives you words instantly. Immersion forces you to infer meaning from context; to hold the tension of ambiguity in your palm; to build intuition about the patterns in speech. One gives you information. The other builds capability.

Action without sustained thought produces movement that goes nowhere. Thought without action remains trapped in abstraction. But seeking - the active pursuit of understanding that cycles between contemplation and experimentation - compounds in ways that passive learning never does.

The concealment isn’t arbitrary. Some things only make sense once you’ve done the work to earn them.