If you’re the type of person to procrastinate while researching for a paper, you’re probably already familiar with Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s seemingly endless list of articles in a multitude of languages tends to be a beating heart for a lot of students when they’re not in the library reading books. From the rarest of historical wars to even biryani recipes, the pages and their complex knowledge can be an escape for the brainiest or the nerdiest of friends that can eat up hours of their schedule.Â
Yet Wikipedia also seems to have found an audience who doesn’t necessarily look for knowledge, but simply wants to discover something new or find a creative outlet at 2am. A single click on a link in an article can bring you to another article completely unrelated to the previous one, or bring you to a series of links that lead you from one topic to another in massive stretches.
 Within 5 clicks, for instance, I was able to move from an article on relativity to an article on God. It feels almost cartoonishly comical, doesn’t it? Human knowledge is seemingly more clustered together than we’d like to believe, despite us thinking it’s in categories. I could, for instance, go from chocolate cupcakes to the Atom bomb in a couple of clicks on Wikipedia, read each article for hours, and somehow, rather than reducing my attention span, the series of articles and linkages would miraculously make sense to me.Â
Sometimes, through these endless searches and rabbit holes, I often scare myself with my mind. How are we able to shift interests and attention so quickly? The more I thought about this, the more I found myself realising that searching and reading across seemingly unrelated articles on Wikipedia was just on the surface. I found myself doing the same thing when I scroll on instagram, seeing reel after reel; moving from drawing tips to Gym reels, to ducks reminding me to drink water. I appreciate the reminder from my favourite bird, though.Â
Apart from reels on social media, I also found myself shifting conversations quickly among friends and family. A quick discussion about internships with my parents, for instance, could turn into a discussion on monkey troops raiding the neighbourhood garbage looking for watermelons, all within 2 minutes.Â
Perhaps we, as communities, tend to like a sense of novelty, where we constantly search for new things that interest us. Perhaps that could explain why I find myself spacing out to the unknown in any math-heavy class, masking it as paying attention to surrounding friends who’re in the same position as me.Â
Being able to converse and read about a variety of topics, no matter how mundane or specific they are, is what makes us, as people, interesting. We not only share thoughts with each other, but we also find a reason to wake up in the morning knowing that we’re not just people who study and work constantly. We’re also people with unique niches and quirks even if we switch the conversation deeper away from its initial start. After all, one could say this article started as endlessly reading Wikipedia rabbit holes, and ended in something more down to Earth.