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Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age?

I do, and I've seen it in others, but from the limited data points I've seen there's no causal relationship with age. I.e. what I've seen is people largely oblivious of nature/ecosystems/flora/fauna sudenly becoming very invested in it, for various reasons, but this doesn't happen at or only beyond a certain age. For me it was around 30 but that's simply because of a series of coincidences (new house, large garden, needed solution for mowing, happened to see a 2nd hand scythe, looked into grassland ecology, etc). But I know people whos obsession started at 16 and at 60 and like everything in between.

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I think it's one of those things that for whichever reason you happen to get switched on to, and once you're attentive to it, you'll constantly be noticing and learning more - once that positive feedback loop of rewarded attention is going, you're off to the races.

It's deeply rewarding to find the world around becoming deeper and more intricately connected. And you get to see more of it every day!

Feedback loop is right. I think there are parallels to the Blank Check podcast playing "The Box Office Game", where those cinephiles try to determine the Box Office Top 5 on the week a particular film was released (even though the players may have been in diapers or not even born on that particular week).

I have also seen this obsessive focus in sports fans: What was the half-season where Pat Maroon played on the New Jersey Devils as a rental? Well they made the playoffs that year which must have been Taylor Hall's MVP Award Season and ah yes! that had to be 2017-18!

if you guys like this kinda stuff i can recommend the latest dump of buckminster fuller institute on his life work (series of transcribed lectures). The guy is fascinated by similar things and has potentially a lot of interesting insights about this if you are unfamiliar.

cool! thanks for sharing, that's my usual fallback reason too.

meaning that i feel it was a change also triggered by other factors and life conditions, or even a reaction to those, but at the same time I realize that my brain started receiving and analyzing and appreciating those signal, not me completely voluntary.

one thing that comes always to my mind is the possible reason of reaction to shitty work and work related stress that makes us crave for nature and nature contact, like a story of a friend stopping the car just to touch grass with the feet.

I relate to an approximate after 30 thing too. But in my case nature contact was reduced compare to initial life part, and I got a garden after that.

But again, it feels like an over semplifcation or easy shortcut, and I believe there is maybe just something innate that blooms at a certain point.

how can we get more datapoints for this? I was trying to crowdsource here :)

one thing that comes always to my mind is the possible reason of reaction to shitty work and work related stress that makes us crave for nature and nature contact

I'm sure that's a thing for some people. And there's research to back that up IIRC. Even seemingly silly things like the smell of a wet forest being beneficial.

One aspect which stood out for me is 'awareness'. I find it deeply fascinating how many people, as I used to be one, can just stroll through everyday locations without even knowing the names of the most common plants let alone think about their connection to the surroundings. Once I started to realize how unaware I was of this I started forzing myself to be more aware and it's fascinating how much there can be going on in like even 1 square meter of nature. And of which I only know a fraction.

And for me this is really meditative - even though it's somewhat counterintuitive. Meditation is usually about clearing the mind, but for me being in nature and filling my mind with thoughts about the whole interconnection of individuals in ecosystems can bring peace and relaxation. Well, as long as I do not think about how we're collectively destroying a lot of it.

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