An Epistemological Descent into Irrelevant Inquiry

I was two hours into reading about the migration habits of Antarctic squid when I realized I had no idea who this article was actually for. There was a name on the assignment email, sure, but it might as well have been a placeholder: “Client.” No face. No voice. Just a vague instruction to “make it engaging.” Which is like telling someone to cook a meal without mentioning if the guest is vegan, allergic to peanuts, or fundamentally opposed to the concept of soup. The coffee next to my keyboard had gone cold. My back hurt from sitting like a pretzel. And for some reason, my browser had 47 tabs open — 46 of them about squid and one about whether or not you can train a raccoon to use chopsticks.

Research, in theory, is noble. You gather facts, organize them, and deliver them like a humble librarian sliding a neatly labeled folder across a table. In practice, it’s more like being a detective in a city where all the witnesses are lying, the suspects are just other witnesses in different hats, and the only crime anyone agrees happened is something called “content.” I’ll start with a keyword search, but then the internet throws its temptations at me. “Sure, you’re looking up squid,” it says, “but have you considered learning about the top 10 haunted toasters of 1983?” And because I am both professional and deeply distractible, I click.

When you’re researching for strangers, there’s a strange intimacy in the ignorance. You begin to build a picture of them in your head. If I’m writing about mid-century modern furniture, I imagine a person in a turtleneck, sipping an aggressively minimalist latte. If it’s an article on survivalist mushroom foraging, I imagine a guy named Carl who once got into a shouting match with a deer. You can’t help but make these people up — you need someone to mentally hand the finished piece to, or else you’re just writing into the void. And the void, I’ve learned, is bad at paying invoices.

There are tactile rituals to this work. I’ll stack my notebooks like I’m building a fortress, uncap a pen like it’s a ceremonial dagger, and take that deep, bracing inhale before diving into the swamp of PDFs, blog posts, and suspiciously upbeat listicles written by people who clearly stopped caring around bullet point six. I keep a mug of coffee within arm’s reach, not for sipping but as a sort of talisman. The smell convinces me I’m still a functioning human being, even when my screen time tracker says otherwise.

Of course, research requires discernment. You can’t just believe the first thing you read. Well, you can, but then you end up confidently writing sentences like, “The average squid can live up to 200 years” (false) or “A group of raccoons is called a mischief” (true, tragically). So you cross-check. You verify. You dive into source after source, which inevitably leads you to forums where someone named “Wolf_Priest88” will explain, in excruciating detail, why every other expert on the topic is wrong. Half of research is learning to politely close these tabs before your sense of reality buckles.

There’s a point, about four hours in, when the original question begins to dissolve. You came in to find out “the best insulation material for tiny homes” and now you’re elbows-deep in an article about medieval Norwegian roofing techniques. Is this relevant? Not directly. But could it be made relevant with enough charm? Absolutely. This is the dangerous part — the seduction of the tangential fact. You want to give the reader the answer they came for, but you also want to tell them that in 1582 a man named Hans fell off his roof while chasing a goose and accidentally invented a new kind of weatherproofing.

It turns out, all this digging is less about the strangers you’re writing for and more about your own need to know. You get hooked on the chase. One source leads to another, which leads to a dusty corner of the internet where a PDF from 1999 is sitting quietly, waiting for someone to acknowledge it.

Side note: By the way, PDF’s were invented in 1993 by a guy with the last name Wornock. I picture that he looks exactly like a man whose original last name was Sir John Von WarKnock, Duke of Portcullis-shire, Earl of of the Royal Order of Bruised Foreheads— as if somewhere deep in his family tree, a great-great-grandfather got into a fistfight with a door and lost, but insisted the door lost instead. His jaw is permanently set in “I will not apologize,” his eyebrows meet in the middle like they’re plotting something, and his shoulders look like they were sculpted by someone who only had a vague idea of human anatomy but a deep respect for battering rams. Even his hair seems to lean forward, ready to start something. You don’t meet a Wornock; you brace for impact… You see what I mean? Wouldn’t that be more fun to read than the actual snippet biography of a real person, in the real world, that helped create a real tool we all use? I don’t know…

Tomato-Potato-Pomato…

Moving on! So, when you do find that perfect nugget — the one fact that makes the whole article click — there’s a hit of dopamine so pure it should probably be regulated.

Shorter side note: if you ever want to know what pure despair feels like, try realizing the “perfect fact” you’ve just spent two hours hunting is actually from a satirical website. Nothing like citing The Onion in a business whitepaper to make you consider a career in feral goat herding.

By the time the draft is done, you’ve lived a dozen different mental lives. You’ve been an architect, a marine biologist, a pastry chef, and a cryptid enthusiast — all before lunch. You’ve used words you didn’t know last week and forgotten them by the time you send the invoice. The article gets polished, proofread, and emailed off to “Client,” who may or may not read it before forwarding it to someone else. And then? Silence. Maybe they’ll reply with “Looks good!” or maybe you’ll never hear from them again, left only with the ghost of your own effort and the lingering image of Carl yelling at a deer.

Still, there’s something about this cycle that’s addictive. You get to be a short-term expert in anything. You get to drop, at a party, “Well, actually, Antarctic squid can detect magnetic fields,” like you’ve been studying them for years, and then walk away before anyone can ask a follow-up question. The work makes you a trivia machine, the kind of person who could dominate a pub quiz but will inevitably forget their own phone number under pressure.

The next day, there will be a new assignment. A new stranger. A new rabbit hole to plunge into. And you’ll swear you’ll stay focused this time. No haunted toasters. No raccoon chopstick videos. Just the task at hand. You’ll mean it, too — right up until the moment you find out there’s an entire subculture of people who build dollhouse-sized replicas of mid-century modern furniture for guinea pigs. And then you’re gone. Deep in it. Writing an article for someone who has no idea you just spent an hour wondering if guinea pigs prefer walnut or teak.

And that’s the thing about researching for strangers: you’re never just looking things up for them. You’re also looking things up for the part of you that’s dying to know useless, glorious, perfectly absurd facts. It’s not a job. It’s a legally sanctioned excuse to fall headfirst into the weirdest corners of the human knowledge pantry and emerge clutching something no one asked for, but everyone, in some small way, needed.

When I go, it’ll be during a twelve-hour research bender, my screen flashing with ancient maps, suspicious pie charts, and an unexplained live feed of a goat standing in a canoe. Where the last thing I scrolled with haste in my notebook will be, “Shut the laptop… it knows too much.”