Research As A Way of Life

How Asking Questions and Looking for Things Gives My Life Meaning

Research as a way of life is having the ability and the time to question the world around you and add to its understanding. It’s defined by our access and ability to contribute to production of knowledge and evaluate the information around us.

Here’s my love letter to research and the pursuit of a life driven by curiosity.

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What’s Missing From My Life:

While scrolling through Notes, my now nightly ritual of finding new articles to read, I came across a piece that I have been writing, at least in my head, for a long time now. The article I’m referring to is Research As Leisure Activity by

Celine Nguyen

. I was captivated by the title alone. I found someone else whose favorite form of entertainment is downloading, organizing, and tagging PDFs! I’m a huge advocate of both leisure and research! I always want to bring more leisure into people’s lives and, personally for me, research is my mode of existing. Just the idea of spending the majority of my days filled with different forms of research, especially as a leisure activity, fills me immediately with excitement and to be honest the will to live. But, I was not prepared for the emotional reaction that came immediately after the surge of pure excitement.

Something inside of me snapped, and I started to cry. Almost instantly the feelings of joy and excitement were superseded by the deepest kind of sadness, followed by feelings of guilt. It hit me like a F-150 truck that pulls right into you as you are going straight at 30 miles an hour on a tiny Vespa. In that moment, I realized that I have been living a life that’s not authentic to who I am. The way I am currently “living” my life is centered on doing things nonstop leaving absolutely no room in my life for things that make me want to live.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had done research, specifically leisurely research, the last time I had carved out time or made time for different forms of research. When I was in graduate school, research in some capacity was always a part of my daily existence, whether that’s readings or preparing for graduate seminars, working on my thesis, dissertation proposal, studying for oral exams, etc. All of these things required some form of research. I didn’t necessarily have to make time specifically for research in order for that to be a part of my daily life. I left my PhD program 8 years ago. Which meant I had to learn how to intentionally make time for research in all its different shapes and forms. In graduate school, you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to true leisure or leisurely activities, but I was still doing much less than I am now with 3 jobs.

Naples National Archaeological Museum, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Nowadays, my time is filled with endless projects and tasks—doing. My days are full of to-do lists and passive meetings. I work my office job from 9am to 4pm, I bake orders afterwards, and write, recipe develop, photograph, film for publications, my newsletter, or my other social media platforms. On the weekends, my days don’t have the 9 to 5, but they are usually busier on the baking and writing front. Outside work, there are also other adult responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning, managing relationships with your family, partner, etc. I am the eldest daughter of immigrants which means I need to be available for parental services such as translating, financial advising, medical advocacy, and of course IT support.

You might be wondering, when during the week do I have time for leisure? Or when is it my time to do research as a leisure activity? Turns out, the real reason I broke down reading the newsletter is because of the realization of just how little time I currently have in my life for leisure and for research.

The feelings of guilt hit when I started thinking of how little time I had spent over the last 8 years doing what brings me joy and purpose. Thoughts like “I wasted 8 years of my life not doing what I love” or “You will never get that time back” or “You wasted so much time away.” None of those thoughts are new, but the connection between research, leisure, and time struck a special cord. It combined two of the most important things in my life, that have not been taking anywhere near enough time in my life. I value leisure and research so much so that I want to build my entire life around those two things as well as food, culture, sharing, and community. At that moment, I felt nowhere near having that life.

As someone who is trying to become a full-time writer the idea of slowing down and introducing more leisure into one’s life seems counterintuitive. Instead, what you should be doing is working, writing, pitching, submitting, applying, raising funds, and working your ass off to achieve your goal etc. Is this actually an effective strategy? Absolutely not! What this strategy is good for is burnout.

How I Want To Live My Life:

And that’s exactly what Celine’s article helped me realize. It helped me become fully aware of how much harm my current lifestyle is doing and how negatively it is impacting my mental, physical, and emotional health. So what am I doing to address this? I am taking a step back or maybe it’s better to say, I am slowing the fuck down.

What does research as a way of life look like on a daily basis? It’s a day that’s driven by curiosity and exploration. A day full of inquiry, pondering, questioning, reading, finding, writing, revising, documenting, excavating, and editing. A day when you have the freedom to explore; be it browsing grocery store aisles, talking to urban farmers, cycling through the city, noticing things and how they change, make observations about new and old patterns, talking to people at the bus stop, foraging, or browsing the internet.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

I am carving out time for leisure and research. I’m blocking off time on my calendar as leisure blocks, and using that time to download pdfs, make lists of books or cookbooks, organizing and managing my databases, reading, and re-organizing files on my computer, in Notion, and opening way too many tabs. I’m also breaking up my time to do different forms of research be it archival, qualitative research, going to the library (partially leisure), browsing online databases, taking notes, talking and asking people questions, and documenting.

To be honest, for me the whole point of life centers around discovery or a sense of adventure that comes from learning, seeing, or experiencing something new. Research is a way of life for me. I am an endlessly curious person. As Celine rights,

“What’s also striking to me is that autodidacts often begin with some very tiny topic, and through researching that topic, they end up telescoping out into bigger-picture concerns. When research is your leisure activity, you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture, economics, nationalism, colonialism.”

My brain is designed to ask questions and make connections. It is something that comes naturally to me. Intellectual curiosity is something that I can’t function without. And I miss spending the majority of my life pursuing my intellectual curiosities through different forms of research. Honestly, looking back. I think one of the main reasons I left academia is because of how narrow their definition of research really is. How interdisciplinary can interdisciplinary scholars really be in academia? Especially given how frowned upon it is, to this day, to introduce nontraditional sources especially in traditional fields such as Classics, History, English, and Art History.

In academia, you receive specific training in a narrow field of specialization, which creates certain opportunities for your work and forecloses others. Most notably, it discourages a certain form of dilettantism—peering into an adjacent field that you don’t have the “right” background for, using techniques you aren’t “qualified” to be doing, introducing references and sources that are nontraditional and even looked down upon in your primary field. Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools, techniques.

Ultimately, I made the decision to leave academia because I wanted the freedom or full control of my intellectual curiosity. I wanted to be free of these narrow definitions and expectations of what is and isn’t worth pursuing. Additionally, I wanted to break away from academic trends and what academia found important. I didn’t want to play the game of what the academy deemed worthy of research funding. Especially since academic interests often don’t actually align with what’s important or happening in our world.

Furthermore, academic writing has always felt exclusionary and left a huge portion of the population out of the conversation. If what you write is only valued and understood by field experts, is that actually making the world a better place? Or is it promoting exclusion, hierarchies of knowledge, and ultimately performing an incredibly self-serving role of protecting the status quo of the academia and all of its system issues? For me, it was the latter.

Photo by Glen Noble on Unsplash

Connection Between Media Literacy and Research Focused Life:

One last thing I wanted to talk about today, is the intersection of media literacy and research. One of my dream jobs is being a fact checker or cultural consultant for publications. The idea of finding resources to substantiate claims or identify gaps in knowledge or most often put claims under scrutiny and deduce that it’s not proven but rather something too many people repeated without any actual research or evidence to back up these claims. For how important this work is, these roles are usually the first to get cut in media. Sadly, I see this a lot in media and food media in current day reporting. A lot of claims are made but few of them can or would withstand scrutiny.

Our society is not really set up in a way that promotes living a curious and research focused life—at least for people who have to work for a living. It is designed to extract as much as possible human labor and is full of mostly meaningless entertainment and poor-quality information. Another article on Substack this week titled The Intellectual Obesity Crisis by

Gurwinder

, talked about the over-saturation of poor quality information in our world. He writes,

Since low-quality information is just as effective at satisfying our information-cravings as high-quality information, the most efficient way to get attention in the digital age is by mass-producing low-quality “junk info”— a kind of fast food for thought. Like fast food, junk info is cheap to produce and satisfying to consume, but high in additives and low in nutrition. It's also potentially addictive and, if consumed excessively, highly dangerous.

I would nuance that a little and say that low-quality info is consumed in much higher quantities to achieve the same satisfaction as consuming a significantly lower amount of high-quality information (similar to food). People need to eat a lot more low-quality content to satisfy their information cravings. And similar to junk food, low-quality info is designed to leave us craving more instead of leaving us feeling satisfied. I also think it is worth pointing out that it’s not a matter of shorter attention spans. I would actually agree with comedian Jimmy Carr who recently said on the Conan podcast that attention spans are actually getting longer but they are getting longer for good quality content.

You talk to most people, they go, People's attention span is getting shorter, and it's all about TikTok. And you go, Yeah, for nonsense, it's shorter, but for good stuff, it's longer. If there's Game of Thrones and it's 60 hours long, you go, Or Breaking Bad. Yeah, great. I'll watch 60 hours of that. I've got a huge attention span for it because it's brilliant.

The nuance here is distinguishing between low quality and high-quality content. People’s ability to decide what they care and don’t care about is very quick. I think we have gotten even more efficient at deciding what we want and don’t want to spend our attention on in this world of attention economy we live in. Hence why media literacy and attention literacy is so important. Additionally, our decisions aren’t always informed by the quality of the content largely because people don’t have the option of doing their own research in a low-quality information saturated world that requires you to constantly evaluate and question everything you see, read, hear, etc.

If we were allowed or maybe more accurately, if society was designed for us to live our lives in a research focused way, we wouldn’t be drowning in low quality information, because people would be able to question, refute, collect their own data, and not be persuaded by content creators who are making unsupported claims. The general public would also not fall for health claims that are really marketing tactics, such as gut health benefits of sodas. Yes, there is a class-action lawsuit against Poppi Soda. The idea of making health claims to sell food products has never sat right with me. As someone who lives in the wellness culture obsessed city of Austin, it is an incredibly prevalent tactic that not enough people seem to question.

Social media and access to self-publishing lies at the intersection of low and high quality information. These communication and information platforms have the power to inform people on a global scale. Social media is in and of itself a form of research. Recent studies have shown that people especially gen-Z are using apps like TikTok to search for information instead of the google search engine. It gives us access to information that is usually contained within specialized fields, closed to the public forums or spaces, and among a selected group of people.

You are able to conduct research in a way that has never been possible before, be it quantitative or qualitative research. There are several books that discuss the methodology of conducting ethnographic research online or through social media. Without research skills people will not see or understand how the information they are being fed or presented has been shaped or manipulated. This is especially terrifying in the context of medicine. Just think of all the misinformation around COVID-19, vaccines, and so much more. There are literal doctors promoting dangerous ideas about the COVID-19 vaccine and its effectiveness in children. They use people’s scientific illiteracy to turn a dangerous personal profit. Stuff of nightmares.

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My Favorite Research Tools and Strategies:

1. Zotero

   1. This is my favorite citation tool! I have been using it since 2011. It helps me collect, track, organize, annotate, cite, and access my sources.

   2. It is perfect for tracking and creating citations, references, footnotes, bibliographies for books and articles.

2. JSTOR and Other Online Databases:

   1. Great research tool for humanities—be it history, classical archaeology, food studies, gender studies, Slavic studies, etc. In essence, JSTOR is a digital library of thousands of academic journals, books, articles, as well as primary sources.

   2. Google scholar can be a good place to start as well!

   3. You can usually get free access through your local library system or if you are affiliated with a university you can access it through your school.

   

3. Follow the Footnotes and Endnotes:

   1. I always read the footnotes of academic articles and track any relevant books or paper or primary resources down.

4. Look Through University Press Catalogs

   1. Here is an example from Princeton Press.

      

5. Read the Work Cited Section and Bibliography:

   1. I always look at the work cited section of articles and the bibliographies at the end of the book.

6. Notion:

   1. This is my favorite project management and data management tool. You can create your own searchable databases and pages all in one place.

7. GoodNotes:

   1. For annotating pdfs, readings pdfs, and general note-taking on everything I read.

8. Worldcat.org:

   1. “WorldCat.org is a resource for locating unique, trustworthy materials that you often can’t find anywhere except in a library. By connecting thousands of libraries’ collections in one place, WorldCat.org makes it easy for you to browse the world’s libraries from one search box.”

   2. Great way to find obscure books from libraries around the world.

9. Notes App:

   1. I use the note app on my iPhone to write down ideas, thoughts, to-do lists, must read list, buy books list, read PDFs list and so on etc.

   2. I then go through the general ideas and put them in whatever category or sub-category I think I want them to live in, be it Substack, pitching to publications, cookbook, Instagram or TikTok, recipes, etc.

10. Bullet Journal:

    1. I try to get things out of my head and onto a piece of paper as much as I can. This helps me manage the mental load of having way too many thoughts or ideas in one day as well as remember things I need to do, research, or write about.

    

11. Browse Independent Bookstores, Used Bookstores, or Library Catalog:

    1. This is probably one of my favorite forms of leisure. Grabbing, opening, scanning the TOC (table of contents), reading the headers, and skimming sometimes the first and last chapters.

12. Lists

    1. Compile lists of indie presses, indie media platforms, and indie magazines.

       1. Let me know if you would be interested in seeing mine!