The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

Don't know about you guys, but reading has become more and more of a burden for me.

It is as if -- I have greatly narrowed my interest such that most books are not interesting any more. Even the sci-fi and fantasy books, once I loved, lost their magic.

Nowadays there are only two types of books that excite me: 1) those about software/hardware engineering, such as iWoz(I even bought a few Tom Swift JR books for my son), Showstopper and Soul of the New Machine, and 2) books about existentialism such as Shestov's philosophy books.

I suspect it has something to do with getting older and getting kid(s).

What about you guys?

I started reading history as a hobby a few years after college when I heard some things from people that just didn’t make sense or didn’t seem true. So I picked up a booked that was well cited, read it while checking the citations after each chapter. Between the Library of Congress and Google, checking original sources has never been easier.

It was a really mind blowing exercise. Much more interesting than fiction.

When I do Bible study now I do it the same way, find whatever sources I can to cross reference with other history at the time. Strongly recommend it.

What’s funny is that history is the subject I was least interested in all through school.

I perused the three posts on this blog, and believe that an LLM was heavily used, because I used one daily, and this is the way its content reads.

The leisure the author speaks of may be their own, and the research of which they speak today may be done by a machine.

I think the intent is good, and if you as the reader get insight from it, then it is still valid, but I cannot read it, because I don’t feel a thread of consciousness helping me experience life with them.

If an author chose to instead pair with an LLM to research on their own and write themselves about it, perhaps it would be different.

Why do these posts keep getting to the front and even to the top of the HN feed? We are no better than machines, I guess.

What a wonderful article! Thanks for sharing!

I’ve been thinking a lot about how research — as both leisure and serious inquiry — is making a comeback in unexpected ways. One sign of that resurgence is the huge interest in so-called “personal knowledge management” (PKM) tools like Obsidian, Roam Research, or Notion. People love referencing Luhmann’s Zettelkasten method, because it promises to structure and connect scattered notes into a web of insights.

But here’s the interesting part: the tools themselves are often treated as ends in their own right, rather than as vehicles for truly deep research or the creation of original knowledge. We end up collecting articles, or carefully formatting our digital note-cards, without necessarily moving to the next step — true synthesis and exploration. In that sense, we risk becoming (to borrow from the article) “collectors rather than readers.”

I read Mortimer Adler’s "How to read a book" 30 years ago. It mentions severl levels of reading-ability. The highest, he says, is “syntopical reading”, which is a powerful antidote to this trend mentioned above. Instead of reading one source in isolation or simply chasing random tangents, syntopical reading demands that we gather multiple perspectives on a single topic. We compare their arguments and frameworks, actively looking for deeper patterns or contradictions. This process leads to truly “connecting the dots” and arriving at new insights — which, in my view, is one of the real goals of research.

So doing research well requires:

1. *A sense of wonder*: the initial spark that keeps us motivated.

2. *A well-formed question*: something that orients our curiosity but leaves room for discovery.

3. *Evidence gathering from diverse sources*: that’s where syntopical reading really shines.

4. *A culminating answer* (even if it simply leads to more questions).

5. *Community*: sharing and testing ideas with others.

What stands out is that none of this necessarily requires an academic institution or official credentials. In fact, it might be even better done outside formal structures, where curiosity can roam freely without departmental silos. In other words, anyone can be an amateur researcher, provided they move beyond the mere collection of ideas toward genuine synthesis and thoughtful communication.

Currently re-visiting and re-describing old tumulus tombs in my area where the last survey was decades ago and where no current description exists. Also, I found tombs via Lidar maps that have been unaccounted before and I am cataloguing them. All that as a hobby and as a member of an association of local history.

Things can be done and should!!

One of the underrated downsides of the professionalization of research is how much it sucked the "fun" out of things. It's strange, but research papers in most fields are written very differently from how people actually talk to each other. Professional researchers still communicate informally like normal humans, in ways that are "fun" and show much more of how they came up with ideas and what they are really thinking. But this is very hard for outsiders to access.

Don't buy it at all. Global book market is healthy and as big as it ever was. Most of us a reading more in a day that even scholars did in a month two centuries ago. It has never been more accessible to research any kind of subject and phenomenon than it is now.

The article is rolling out the same old bourgeois doomsday theory people like Stefan Zweig and McLuhan subscribed to. Luckily the democratization of literacy or even leaving the medium of the book behind is the opposite of an issue.

I do a ton of product research for leisure...

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