I spend a meaningful amount of time curating what I think of as my “inputs”: data from informational sources (news and nonfiction), but also experiential sorts of things like music and fiction and other aesthetic experiences.

My ideal outcome is to maintain a generally informed sense of the world and of myself while planting seeds for future pursuits and working on my ability to dig deeper into anything that catches my attention.

Alongside that informational ambition, I also aspire to always be generating little sparks of interest, stoking my curiosity and awe, and generally remaining intellectually, emotionally, creatively, and humanely awake and engaged.

Said another way: I want to be healthy, fulfilled, excited about life, to feel generally good, to know about things, and to be in a position to both discover new potential passions and to cultivate any passions that’ve already caught my interest.

We are influenced and shaped in countless ways by the variables in our environments, and while some of these influences are from earlier in our lives and planted deep, a lot of them are more contemporary, transient, and manipulatable.

So the theory is that in addition to the superficial enjoyment (or lack thereof) I might experience directly and immediately as a consequence of listening to a specific album of music or engaging with a particular painting, if I can consciously wrangle these elements on a consistent basis I can end up with generally better outcomes, overall, across many aspects of my life, beyond the bracketed moments in which I’m actually engaging with these things.

This approach has paid off pretty well over the half-dozen or so years I’ve been operating in accordance with it, but I’ve discovered along the way (and this seems obvious in retrospect) that a perfectly balanced set of inputs doesn’t exist, and a nicely balanced set of inputs can only ever be temporary.

There’s no perfectly balanced portfolio of inputs because there are countless possible things to which we might expose ourselves, and even more combinations of such things.

Within that boggling array of qualia-blends there are innumerable possible positive outcomes for any definition of the word “positive” we might choose to use.

So the idea of a “perfect” combination is inapplicable; there are better and worse combinations at any given moment, but probably no permanently faultless informational aggregates.

And even the most close-to-perfect, liberating and happiness-inducing array will eventually become cumbersome and stale, as we are ever-changing entities and we grow, in part, as a consequence (and in a direction informed by) these same inputs.

The act of soaking up this data, these stories, these aesthetic experiences, then, inevitably leads to growth of various kinds, which in turn transforms us into versions of ourselves that require different inputs.

This is a frustrating reality if you crave consistency and security and things just holding still for a moment.

But it can also be liberating and reassuring because it implies our dissatisfaction with our current norms is the result of growth: we’ve ingested our fill and are ready to transubstantiate ourselves into our next-step form, which will incorporate everything we’ve learned and experienced since our most recent budding-blossoming cycle concluded.

An even more accurate way of thinking about this is that it’s an ever-advancing process, and though some cyclical moments will stand out more than others, we’re always absorbing, processing, refining, and recalibrating our external sensory and experiential apparatuses to account for our expansion, contraction, and recalibration rhythm.

This can be an uncomfortable reality at times, but also a fulfilling one if recognized and embraced for what it is.

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