Miss..alien..us !
Grammar and spelling have taken a backseat in the above caption. Was it by design? Most certainly. Miscellaneous is the word I am referring to. That said, the culture we operate in buckets us in a manner that is alien, which means we miss the bus, more often than not.
You enter a physical book store or on Amazon, miscellaneous is always the largest category. With the smallest following. The internet and its reach has created the rather wondrous ‘ long tail effect ‘ which means there is an audience for almost anything and everything however small it might be.
The same web has made us lazy ( if there was a potential to be more so) – that irrespective of the order (or chaos), we will find it. That was not the way we were. Spoons went into a certain slot, so did shoes and socks, books and magazines, brooms and mops…everything had a clear slot and it was well sorted. Finding was a seamless default mode.
Taxonomy (or classification of things) help us get to where we want to faster and better. Being in ‘ search ‘ mode always takes away time, calls for more effort( and thereby brings in more of the accompanying inertia), derails momentum and flow and make us eschew the useful serendipity that comes with finding things where they need to be, where we expect them to be.
If you find yourself in ‘ find mode ‘ most of the time, it’s time to find a way out. The big sort will help. Unless, you are happy, re-inventing the wheel, all the time. In the process, ‘ missing the wood for the trees‘.
ENDS