A wider world · Collection guide · 5 stops
See life from further out
This path is for a problem that has begun to fill the whole frame. Move through curiosity, attentive listening, lives unfolding over time and a wider scientific scale, then return to ordinary daily experience. The aim is to change the setting around the problem, without pretending that scale makes it unimportant.
Browse this collection in reading order →Suggested routes through material saved to explore. I haven’t read or watched everything here yet. The order and prompts are editorial suggestions based on available source text, excerpts, descriptions and synopses; they are not personal ratings or claims of completed viewing.
Begin with a question about the world
Feynman’s Fun to Imagine brings curiosity to familiar phenomena. Start by letting an ordinary object or event become interesting again, rather than immediately trying to solve the concern that brought you here.
Pause & try
Choose something ordinary you do not fully understand. Write three questions about how it works before looking for an explanation.
Spend time with a single performance
Sakamoto’s Opus offers an extended musical performance as a different form of attention. Place it after the questions as a chance to stay with an experience without needing to turn every moment into information.
Pause & try
Listen to a passage without multitasking. Note a detail of timing, sound or silence you might have missed while doing something else.
Look at lives across time
The Up Series follows people at intervals across their lives. Begin with the first instalment and return to later ones as time allows; you do not need to consume the whole series in one sitting to start noticing change and continuity.
Pause & try
What do you expect will still matter about your current concern in seven years? What might change in a way you cannot predict?
Widen the scale again
Sagan’s Cosmos adds a scientific and historical setting beyond an individual lifetime. Start with one episode, then connect its questions to the curiosity you began with rather than treating the wider scale as an instruction to dismiss everyday life.
Pause & try
Name one idea that changes your sense of scale. Does it alter the urgency, significance or simply the setting of the problem you brought?
Bring the wider view into an ordinary day
Videos · Est. 23 min
This Is Water David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech →
Collected by The Unintuitive ↗
Wallace’s This Is Water returns the route to familiar frustrations and choices of attention. The final move is practical: a changed perspective matters when it affects how you meet an actual person or situation.
Pause & try
Choose a recurring irritation tomorrow. Write two plausible interpretations of it and decide what response would fit the wider view you want to practise.
After the five stops
Take it into your own life.
Describe the original concern again, including the people, timescale and uncertainty around it. Keep what still deserves action and identify one response you can change tomorrow. Return to a performance, question or episode when it helps you see more, rather than merely consume more.
Continue exploring
Items 1–5 are the guided route above. The remaining items are listed alphabetically below; choose what interests you next. These numbers match the collection shelf.
- “I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been” → Find on the shelf: “I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been” →
- 180 South → Find on the shelf: 180 South →
- Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown → Find on the shelf: Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown →
- Civilisation Series → Find on the shelf: Civilisation Series →
- How Social Media Shortens Your Life → Find on the shelf: How Social Media Shortens Your Life →
- How to Time Travel → Find on the shelf: How to Time Travel →
- Mr. Jaynes’ Wild Ride → Find on the shelf: Mr. Jaynes’ Wild Ride →
- Reading The Room → Find on the shelf: Reading The Room →
- Sam Harris basically unlocks the secret to life → Find on the shelf: Sam Harris basically unlocks the secret to life →
- Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) → Find on the shelf: Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) →
- The Last Question By Isaac Asimov → Find on the shelf: The Last Question By Isaac Asimov →
- The Salt of the Earth → Find on the shelf: The Salt of the Earth →
- The Same River Twice - David Quammen → Find on the shelf: The Same River Twice - David Quammen →