The Things You Search for Lead You Back to Yourself

It’s like a Spotify year-end review, except the playlist is your own curiosity.

Most writing, I believe, is an act of reaching out to others and acknowledging a shared sense of being at a crossroads.

What am I going to do next? How can I make sure things work out?

These are the essential questions that we carry around. We apply them to the act of ending a relationship or buying a pack of gum. The only difference is a matter of scale and time spent fretting.

The New Year is a natural crossroads in which we ask questions about the type of person we want to be. How we want to look. How we want to feel. How we want to spend our time.

As someone who tends to loiter too long at the crossroads, I’m in no position to provide specific directions to a better place. But I do want to offer a quick way for you to get an unvarnished portrait of your interests — and start drawing your own map.

What you’re curious about. What you’ve spent time, thought, and energy on. All of that information is within arm’s reach, right now. You’ve been recording it on your phone, for weeks and months, probably without even thinking about it that much.

For anyone who meditates, or has even tried meditation, you’re familiar with the concept of observing thoughts as they arise. Here I want to suggest that the unclosed tabs on your browser serve as a digital record of those thoughts as they occurred throughout your days, over the course of the year.

And understanding those thoughts can provide insight into where you want to go next.

It’s not normal, but I can explain…

In 2020, I left 83 tabs open on my phone (listed below). This is up 224 percent from 2019, a year in which I left 37 tabs open.

That number might sound absurd, but there are two (somewhat) rational explanations.

The first is that, over the past several years, I’ve developed a fairly deliberate system for how I use the browser: If I begin a search and satisfy what I was looking for, I’ll close the tab. If I begin a search but want to explore the topic further, I’ll keep it open. The tabs accumulate. Then, at the end of the year, I review them all, close them out, and write a list of what they were.

This way, I begin again, with both a clean slate and a detailed inventory of all the searches that were unfinished — all my interests that I didn’t follow through on.

The final step is to reconcile the list and decide which topics should become a higher priority and which should be forgotten.

This practice started in 2014, the year my oldest son was born. By no coincidence, this was also the year in which my nights and weekends ceased to stretch out in a beautiful, uninterrupted surplus of time. Gone were the days when I could, for instance, randomly spend a couple hours delving into the life and paintings of Corot, or simply watching a movie.

Now, in the place of those activities, might be a solitary tab headlined “Corot use of light,” or the name of a film I might never get around to.

As the practice has evolved, so too has the way I use the search tool. In addition to its basic function, it now serves as a kind of mood board, journal, and list of reminders.

Oh, yeah. That, too.

The second explanation is…2020. It was a year that seemed to barely begin, and then interrupt itself, again and again, until it ended with more of a sense of relief than resolution. It was a year of canceled plans, a year of making do. Often, it was a year of hitting refresh, over and over, to see if things had gotten any better or worse. The odds were always fifty-fifty.

I was laid off from a job, without irony, on April Fools’ Day. Luckily, I had several new projects lined up within a week. I once again embraced the life of a free agent. (And decided that all jobs — whether we admit it or not — are freelance jobs.)

By circumstance, I worked with, and learned from, a larger number of people. At once, I began to receive an abundance of brand-new recommendations. I read books that I never would’ve given a thought to before, listened to podcasts, discovered that newsletters have become a trend. In general, I explored more — opened myself up to new ideas and new ways of seeing things.

Because this might sound overly romantic, let me place it in a more sober light: I spent a lot of time casting about for what I wanted to commit to next.

Ultimately, your list will look more like a signal than noise

I’ve included my own list here — just to provide an example of the odd way topics stand next to each other, like the crew from The Usual Suspects, as you try to figure out the patterns and links between them.

My list will probably seem myopic: writers, artists, cocktails, and home decor. Put in a harsher light, the overarching theme of the list could be titled “White Privilege.” But recognizing your myopia is one of the points of this exercise. And myopia, at times, might be considered a symptom of purpose.

What’s clearly missing in the list below are searches about the election, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the protests, the college scandals, all the cultural noise about Karens. Plenty of time was spent following these things, as well as the skyrocketing number of covid cases.

But you don’t have to search for those things. They come to you, in every headline, in every social-media post. Your duty is to sit back and listen.

Your searches, I’d argue, are ultimately more insightful, because they’re what you actively sought out (for better or worse).

If you’ve begun this year at what feels like a crossroads, this exercise only takes a few minutes and, by the end, will have you nodding your head in recognition.

If you make any interesting discoveries, please let me know (benjamincake @ gmail dot com).

Open tabs of 2020 (in reverse-chronological order from December to January)

Doris Lessing
William Maxwell
Edward Burns
Anna Wiener (two tabs)
Li Jin
MF Doom
Allan Scott
David Chase (four tabs)
Tana French (two tabs)
Tricker’s Brogue Boots
Robert Cialdini
When was wine invented
Patricia Highsmith
Ogilvy slide decks
Stephen Denning Springboard Stories
Bill Murray
Wm Brown Project
Vintage Benedictine poster
Zach Galifianakis
Proverbs
Mark T. Sullivan
The use of rhetorical questions
Netflix subscriptions 2007
MyPillow deceptive advertising lawsuit
Anti-intellectualism
John Le Carre
Walter Tevis
Peanuts
Ron Popeil profile Malcolm Gladwell
Charles Kahlenberg
Frank Zappa Archives
Noah Kagan
Travel bar set
CB2 Leather Bench
Raymond Chandler
Life Edited
Casper shutting down Van Winkle
Restoration Hardware
Scott Peck
Alan Furst
Emily Nussbaum Bad Fan Theory
Gibraltar glasses
Matthew Baker
Meehan’s Bar Guide
Emma Cline Query Letter
Richard Price The Whites Review
1,000 True Fans theory
Henry Miller’s Eleven Commandments
Writers House Literary Agency
David Milch Men Behind the Curtain GQ
Billy Wilder
Vince Gilligan
Colson Whitehead
David Benioff
Billy Wilder (again)
Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler
Emergency by Denis Johnson
Doris Lessing (again)
Nadine Gordimer
Walter Tevis (again)
Thin Man Screenplay PDF (four tabs)
Jia Tolentino
Mark Haddon
David E. Kelley
Christopher McQuarrie’s advice
Tony Gilroy
Matt Sumell
National Book Awards
Psychic improvisation and automatic writing
Baruch Spinoza
Charlie Kaufman BAFTA lecture
Motives for spying
Christian Lorentzen
Pulitzer Prizes for fiction
David Carr