TITLE: Caring about something whittles the world down to a more manageable size
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: July 31, 2022  8:54 AM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:

 In <em>The Orchid Thief</em>, there is a passage where author Susan
 Orlean describes a drive across south Florida on her way to a state
 preserve, where she'll be meeting an orchid hunter.  She ends the
 passage this way:

<blockquote><em>
 The land was marble-smooth and it rolled without a pucker to the
 horizon.  My eyes grazed across the green band of ground and the
 blue bowl of sky and then lingered on a dead tire, a bird in
 flight, an old fence, a rusted barrel.  Hardly any cars came
 toward me, and I saw no one in the rearview mirror the entire
 time.  I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so
 many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty
 road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made
 me feel lonely to the bone.  The world is so huge that people are
 always getting lost in it.  There are too many ideas and things
 and people, too many directions to go.  I was starting to believe
 that the reason it matters to care passionately about something
 is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.  It
 makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.
 If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn't have see this space as
 sad-making and vacant--I think I would have seen it as acres of
 opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found.
</em></blockquote>

 John Laroche, the orchid hunter at the center of <em>The Orchid
 Thief</em>, comes off as obsessive, but I think many of us know
 that condition.  We have found an idea or a question or a
 problem that grabs our attention, and we work on it for years.
 Sometimes, we'll follow a lead so far down a tunnel that it
 feels a lot like the swamps Laroche braves in search of the
 ghost orchid.

 Even a field like computer science is big enough that it can feel
 imposing if a person doesn't have a specific something to focus
 their attention and energy on.  That something doesn't have to be
 forever...  Just as Laroche had cycled through a half-dozen
 obsessions before turning his energy to orchids, a computer
 scientist can work deeply in an area for a while and then move
 onto something else.  Sometimes, there is a natural evolution in
 the problems one focuses on, while other times people choose to
 move into a completely different sub-area.  I see a lot of people
 moving into machine learning these days, exploring how it can
 change the sub-field they used to focus exclusively on.

 As a prof, I am fortunate to be able to work with young adults as
 they take their first steps in computer science.  I get to watch
 many of them find a question they want to answer, a problem they
 want to work on for a few years, or an area they want to explore
 in depth until they master it.  It's also sad, in a way, to work
 with a student who never quite finds something that sparks their
 imagination.  A career in software, or anything, really, can look
 as huge and empty as Orlean's drive through south Florida if
 someone doesn't care deeply about something.  When they do, the
 world seems not huge and empty, but full of possibility.

 I'm about halfway through <em>The Orchid Thief</em> and am quite
 enjoying it.
-----