Utterly Useless Information
At gunpoint, If there was one thing that you could bank on me with your life, It would be my ability to contain seemingly unimportant and inconsequential information. For instance, If I had to section out the most active part of my brain, you would be exposed to throwaway pop culture references, dispensable conversation starters, the etymology of the word ‘etymology’, the story behind the scar across your wrist, why cats love to sit on laptops and cues to end an introductory paragraph (which I seem to be forgetting right now).
This fascination of mine can be traced back to when encyclopedias and short stories were a thing. A typical afternoon in 7-year old Maitri’s routine would include flipping through pages and pages of these books, diving face first into an unending tunnel of arbitrary information . Few years down the line, I was told that the classmate notebooks that we had in school, were apparently for taking notes and not for just reading the fun-facts towards the end. Suspicious. (I still think they’re lying).
Ever since then, I’ve carried with me, a sense of wonder about sporadic information which are discarded as pointless by a majority of people, as they don’t really contribute to anything meaningful on their own.
What parts do these random facts, references, anecdotes and just tiny nuggets of information that we go around collecting, play in shaping our personality and our social behavior?
We humans are known to be narcissistic creatures, perpetually trying to assert our distinct individuality. So the innate sense of individualism that sprouts out of the realization that, inside of you, there exists a handpicked and carefully curated combination of unique and interesting ideas, just sparks some inexplicable delight. If this wasn’t enough, the act of sharing such information with others just doubles the joy in an instant, as in that moment, the listener (knowingly or unknowingly), attaches your identity to that piece of information.
Think about this: On a Monday afternoon at work, knowing the fact that ‘airplane food doesn’t actually suck, but the elevation just distorts our taste buds’ might not sound very enticing. However after you’re done nibbling on the salted peanuts on an 8-hour flight with nothing else to do, this could very well be an opener for a (possibly) riveting conversation with your co-passenger.
There is this instant connect that trivia, facts and shared pop culture experiences bring with them, which make them extremely effective cross-cultural adhesives, which is fascinating!
So the next time you're in Central Europe and find yourself striking up a conversation with an Austrian native just because they were carrying a Harry Potter paperback, notice how your shared fascination for the conspiracy theories of the wizarding world, gave you that extra 2 mins of pure joy in an unidentified country. So was it utterly useless to stay up at 3am reading it after all?
