Intellectual Genealogies

The Romanticism of Being an Autodidact

What’s your intellectual genealogy? What—or who—has influenced the ideas you currently hold? And how intentional were the choices of those models?

The problem with we autodidacts is that we often believe we’re merely “following our own curiosity” or heading down certain trails that are of interest to us at a given time. But we shouldn’t flatter ourselves.

I enjoy life on the intellectual margins. I love settling into the basement of an old book shop and following the footnotes in classic texts wherever they lead me. That seems like an anti-mimetic enough of a thing to do, doesn’t it? I have gone down rabbit holes on everything from psychedelics (not experientially) to ergodicity in just the past couple of weeks.

But if we look deeper, we find a more complex dynamic at work.