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One thing we've missed out on in this year of pandemic restrictions, says psychologist Manos Tsakiris, is *serendipity*: "The random friend of a friend that we didn’t meet. The flirting glance of passers-by that we didn’t catch. The books we didn’t accidentally browse."
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Tsakiris notes that the term “serendipity” comes from the fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip,” in which the heroes were always making discoveries of things they were not looking for. For more than a year, he notes, all of us "have been exiled from Serendip."
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What is the opposite of Serendip? Tsakiris points to the novel “Armadillo,” in which author William Boyd imagined a land called Zembla. This is a place where cinemas, theaters, museums, galleries, concert halls, pubs and restaurants have all been shut down.
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In Zembla, citizens don't stumble upon social encounters or works of culture; they don't make delightful or surprising discoveries. Rather, their experiences are entirely dictated by algorithms that decide for them what they will see.
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In Boyd's invented terminology, they exist in a state of "zemblanity," or the opposite of serendipity—"the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.”
Sound familiar?
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Sound familiar?
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During the pandemic, "even the social encounters that we have managed to maintain have been less spontaneous, more habitual, transactional and instrumental rather than interactive or playful, dictated less by social churn than by formal planning," Tsakiris notes.
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We extend our own minds with the minds of other people, and we've had many fewer opportunities to do so this year. As we reconstruct our lives post-COVID, we should be thinking in terms of rebuilding our "architectures of serendipity."
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Here's Tsakiris's article: https://bit.ly/2PMkUa1
Here's Boyd's novel: https://bit.ly/3uzgz8K
And here's an article by Cass Sunstein, from whom Tsakiris borrowed the term "architectures of serendipity": https://bit.ly/2OFgaSV
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Here's Boyd's novel: https://bit.ly/3uzgz8K
And here's an article by Cass Sunstein, from whom Tsakiris borrowed the term "architectures of serendipity": https://bit.ly/2OFgaSV
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