The Problem of Too Much Curation
This article is a bit more philosophical in nature, so hang on until the end and you will see many applications for your professional and personal life.
Anyone who walks around the palace gardens of Versailles just outside of Paris can tell you just how beautiful a curated garden can be. Every flower, hedge, tree, and building are specifically designed to bring the onlooker an experience of beauty as designed by humans. Visiting such gardens all around the world will not only help you experience organized loveliness, but also great feats of engineering from our past.
It is easy for those of us who live in a big city to only experience curated gardens. Living in Seoul whose metropolitan area has 25 million people provides plenty of opportunities to see impressive landscaping and green spaces designed for its citizens.
This type of curation extends well beyond the outdoors and natural world to both our internal lives and our digital lives. There are numerous TV series dedicated to how to improve your workspace or living space. A place for everything and everything in its place, so the saying goes. This can lead you to believing that everything should be well manicured perfectly arranged.
How much more so for our digital lives? Not only do we often times thoughtfully and carefully share pictures, musings, and posts of others as a way to communicate with the world around us and how we want them to think of us. But, the very content that we view and consume is also curated for us to keep us engaged.
It is too easy for us to gravitate towards what is convenient for the ease of being entertained or engaged. Content on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. is designed to keep watching. This continuous cycle of viewership makes us passive or narrow in our thoughts.
While we are drawn into our own world of chosen content for us, we give up little bits of freedom. Content is easier to find and companies sell us advertisements in exchange. Moving away from curation exposes us to a more unexpected world, the real world, a place where we get to explore and see what is next.
Wondering a wild land is exciting. It takes all of your senses to understand, yet we cannot fully. Every stone, plant, or animal is unexpected, yet ordinary. The wildness causes us to respond and be aware of ourselves, as well as our environment. This is a place of learning.
The more willing we are to relinquish control and micromanagement of the world around us, the more we are able to observe and interact in it. As creatures of comfort, humans want to have an environment that is easy and predictable. Life is not that way and the more we embrace and seek to understand this, the better positioned we are to gain wisdom and understanding.
Therefore, let’s challenge ourselves. Let’s live life messily, not expect everything to be perfect or ideal. Allow things to be as they are and enjoy natural order. No, I am not suggesting that we just give up and let everything happen in its own way, but if we can allow ourselves to be immersed in the non-ideal and less curated life, we might just learn from it.
In Relation to Teaching:
Our lessons are perfectly designed, well thought out, and very good intentioned. In our scripts and presentations, do we allow or encourage time for the unexpected? Are we prepared for the unprepared, for the questions that are nuanced or slightly off topic? When you are designing your lesson, create space for where the students may shape its direction. This can lead to great learning moments.