It may sound cliche, but as I've gotten older I've started taking more and more interest into history, and specifically the history of things we hold commonplace. I like to play a game of "connections" (a la James Burke) and learn about things by unfolding knowledge.
Take something familiar like amazon.com.
- It's an on-line department store
- department stores were designed to consolidate various shopping venues under one roof
- Sears was an early department store
- they launched their stores to cater to working classes and farmers outside of city centers and in concert with their catalog business
- their catalogs were common in rural general stores
- general stores used them to expand the merchandise they could offer to rural customers
- rural customers frequented general stores to pick up items they couldn't manufacture on their farms
- they came into the town where the general stores were to sell the stuff they grew on their farms
- towns sprung up along major navigation routes: roads, rail, rivers and canals
- before roads and rail, there were rivers and canals
- rivers are hard to reliably use to move commodities from rural areas to market
- canals offered a more controlled environment to move commodities to market
- once canals were established goods could easily move both ways
- this made it more convenient to live in rural areas
- early canals were fed by gravity, tapping into nearby rivers for water, this operated the locks and gates
- an investor and promoter of canals was George Washington
- George Washington, other than being a General and President was a businessman
- Among his business ventures he invested in farming, whisky, canals, tobacco, horse breeding, weaving (a diversified portfolio)
- one of his investments was the C&O canal
- the C&O canal reached Harpers Ferry in 1833 and connected it with Washington D.C.
- Harpers Ferry was named after Quaker Colonist Robert Harper and the ferry service he established
- It's at the confluence of the Potomac and and Shenandoah rivers
- Before the industrial revolution and steam power, it was used as a military manufacturing center and the rivers powered manufacturing equipment used to carve wood and metal into guns
- Equipment used to manufacture weapons were standardized and the invention of interchangeable parts was pioneered there by Captain John Hall between 1820 and 1840 establishing patterns used later in the industrial revolution and gives us today everything from Cars to iPhones
Each one of these things can be chased off into different directions and the game of Connections can continue. Along the way you can learn about mechanical engineering, hydrolic power, logistics, commercial models, and so on as the web of connections grows out and grows more complex.
Suddenly you'll start to fill in knowledge gaps in other areas, frontier life, colonization, labor saving devices, information transmission, etc. You'll start to understand motivations and first principals behind the modern world. The "why?" behind things. Before too long you'll be able to make seamless connections up-down and across time. The whole of human history will start to take on a vividness it doesn't from just reading a linear textbook.
Even better, at particularly interesting stopping points, you can probably go visit those places and see those things yourself and continue to unfold knowledge and ideas.
Imagine my surprise when I saw how much of ancient Rome was built out of brick and not marble, and the implications that arise from an industry built around supplying brick to the ancient empire and not quarrying marble! Or seeing Roman concrete in the Pantheon and then climbing the Duomo in Florence and seeing Brunelleschi overcoming a thousand years of ignorance and figuring out how to build a dome again -- and then climbing other domes and seeing Brunelleschi's idea repeated over and over again for centuries. Or seeing the Mosque of Muhammad Ali in Cairo, built from Pyramid stone and adorned with a French clock, and then going to Paris and seeing the Luxor Obelisk at the Place de la Condorde in Paris and thinking through the problem of that exchange in detail (it was like a brain explosion for me). Or walking the restored fortifications at Rhodes and understanding how difficult the approach by the Ottomans was, and then seeing Malta right after and learning about the Knights of Saint John. Or seeing Hadrian's Arch in Athens, Hadrian's Wall in the U.K, Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome and so many statues of Hadrian that you realize you can recognize him by sight, 2,000 years after his death, from across the room in Washington D.C. Or visiting Dasan's grave in South Korea, and then seeing the fortifications at Hwaseong Fortress and then realizing he was Catholic and reading about Christianity in Korea and finding out it started in China!
The world is a mindblowing place full of problems that so many smart people throughout history have tried all kinds of interesting ways to solve. I find I'm often inspired and in awe at what those who have come before us have solved, in far more primitive times and without any of the means we have available to us today. It puts in perspective things we still struggle with today, and connects me to people and their thoughts from thousands of years ago. Time starts to flatten out and appreciation starts to creep in.