It was a friend who insisted you had to see it, the arts critic in Saturday’s newspaper or maybe the person behind the counter at the video store who handed you a VHS or DVD and said, “Trust me.”
And, before you keep reading, I’m aware of how old this makes me seem, but bear with me on this …
There was always an element of chance involved. Someone else’s taste collided with yours, and sometimes they were spectacularly wrong, but every now and then they introduced you to something that changed you.
Museum’s and art galleries are wonderful places where you choose what you would like to see in your own time and at your own pace. Hours can pass while you are meandering around and drinking in the creativity on display.
Now an algorithm does the recommending.
Netflix tells us what we’ll probably like. Spotify builds a playlist called Made For You. TikTok decides what comes next before we’ve even finished the current video, and Instagram has become remarkably good at predicting what will keep us scrolling for another five minutes.
It’s incredibly efficient, but I wonder if it’s quietly changing the way we discover the world.
I’ve been thinking about this because I can’t remember the last time I stumbled across something completely unexpected. Increasingly, everything I watch, read, listen to or buy arrives because a machine has decided it’s adjacent to something I already enjoyed, and it’s kind of boring.
The algorithm has become our curator for better or worse, and curators have enormous power because they decide what gets placed in front of us.
The strange thing is that algorithms aren’t really designed to surprise us. They’re designed to predict us.
Their job isn’t to expand our tastes so much as reinforce them, which means we can slowly end up living inside beautifully personalised little worlds. Your Spotify sounds different to mine. Your Instagram isn’t my Instagram. Your TikTok feed has become uniquely yours, shaped by thousands of tiny decisions you’ve made without even noticing.
It’s comforting. It’s convenient, and I’m channelling Ted Lasso here, I wonder if it’s making us a little less curious.
Some of the best things in my life arrived by accident – books I picked up because of a strange cover, films that happened to be on television late at night, songs playing in a café that I couldn’t stop thinking about, conversations with people I’d never have chosen if I’d filtered my friendships the way social media filters content.
None of those discoveries were optimised, they were completely serendipitous.
Serendipity is one of those beautiful words that almost feels impossible to translate. It’s finding something valuable that you weren’t looking for, getting lost and discovering that getting lost was actually the point.
It has been a while, but the last time I walked into a bookshop intending to buy one particular book but left with something entirely different because it happened to be sitting on a display table. I’d never heard of the author, but something about the title caught my attention, and it ended up being one of the best books I’ve read last year. It was called Whalefall (which is coincidentally being made into a film which is out in October).
An algorithm would almost certainly never have shown it to me because it didn’t resemble my previous reading habits closely enough.
That’s the problem with predictive technology. It knows who we’ve been, but it’s much less interested in who we might become.
There’s something deeply human about wandering.
Children do it instinctively. They collect interesting rocks that have absolutely no value, follow butterflies instead of footpaths and ask questions that seem completely unrelated to the conversation everyone else is having.
Adults spend years trying to become more efficient. We optimise our routes, automate our shopping, curate our feeds and listen to podcasts at double speed because apparently even walking has become something to maximise.
We’ve confused efficiency with wisdom.
Maybe meandering isn’t wasted time. It’s one of my favourite words.
I wonder if we’ve become slightly afraid of meandering because it feels unproductive. If we’re not heading somewhere, scrolling towards something or consuming something tailored specifically for us, it can feel as though we’re doing life incorrectly.
But some experiences refuse to be personalised.
Beauty often interrupts us precisely because we weren’t looking for it. A sunset catches us on the drive home. A piece of music drifts out of an open window. A work colleague recommends a television series we’d normally dismiss. Someone lends us a novel we’d never have picked ourselves.
Those moments stay with us because they arrive uninvited, something the algorithm would have skipped.
Now you’re probably reading this thinking I’m a luddite. I’m not anti-technology. I love that streaming has introduced me to extraordinary films from countries I’d never otherwise encounter, and I’m grateful that technology makes discovering culture easier than ever before.
Sometimes I think we’ve outsourced one of the most delightful parts of being human – the art of finding things we didn’t know we needed.
Maybe that’s why independent bookshops still feel magical. You don’t know exactly what you’ll leave with. Maybe that’s why local cinemas, libraries and record stores still matter. They create collisions rather than predictions and make room for surprise.
Recently, I caught myself opening three different apps looking for something to watch, and every recommendation looked strangely familiar. Different titles, same emotional promise. Instead, I watched I watched Jaws. 1970’s films are so underrated.
Maybe we need to become amateurs at getting lost again. Take a different street home. Read the novel that isn’t trending. Listen to the album with almost no plays. Talk to someone outside your usual circle. Leave space in your weekend without filling every hour.
Let curiosity interrupt your plans because meaningful lives are rarely built by following the most efficient path. They’re built through detours, interruptions and unexpected invitations.
The algorithm is very good at showing us more of ourselves.
Maybe, in a world that’s become expertly curated, meandering has become a quiet act of resistance.
Not because every detour leads somewhere extraordinary, but because occasionally it does, and those discoveries often become the stories we spend the rest of our lives telling.
Follow Adrian Drayton on his Substack – The Long Conversation – where he writes about faith, culture and media and the questions shaping our common life.
