Growing Up Curious

My mum couldn't afford childcare. So she'd drop me at the local library.

That's not a sad story. That's an origin story.

The library was free. It was safe. It was full of things I didn't understand yet. Greek mythology. Romance novels. Encyclopedias with pictures of planets. And in the corner, if you were patient enough, a computer.

I'd sit there for hours. Not because I was studious. Because I was curious. Nobody told me what to read. Nobody handed me a list. I just wandered the shelves and pulled down whatever looked interesting.

The Greek mythology section had gods who behaved worse than humans. Zeus couldn't keep it together. Athena played favourites. Odysseus lied to everyone and we called it heroism. I didn't know the word "archetype" yet, but I knew these stories felt true in a way that the books in the kids' section didn't. The gods weren't really about gods. They were about us.

Three thousand years later, we're still telling the same stories. The Matrix is Plato's cave with better special effects. Every superhero movie is a Greek quest. TikTok drama is Mount Olympus with ring lights. The medium changes. The myths don't.

Then there were the romance novels.

Nobody talks about romance novels at dinner parties unless they're making fun of them. But romance is a $1.5 billion annual industry. The highest-earning fiction genre. More than thrillers. More than sci-fi. More than literary fiction. Every year, for decades.

That's not a guilty pleasure. That's a signal. A billion-dollar signal that says: people want to feel loved and they'll keep paying for that feeling over and over again. Romance novels are memes in the Dawkins sense. They replicate because they're fit. They match the deepest want.

The library didn't judge what I was reading. That matters. There was no algorithm pushing me toward "people who read mythology also read literary fiction." The library just had shelves. All of them open. Mythology next to romance next to Freud next to the Bible. All doing the same job: telling humans what they already want to hear about themselves.

Freud showed up on those shelves too. "Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me." A kid reading about the unconscious mind, probably between a book about Zeus and a book about love. The throughline was the same. Mythology: humans say they want order, but the gods are chaos. Romance: humans say love is irrational, but they'll pay billions for it. Freud: humans say they're rational, but the unconscious runs the show.

The surface is never the thing. I learned that at the library before I had the words for it.

And then there was the computer.

One computer. In the corner. Shared. You had to wait your turn. Thirty-minute time limit. When the seat was empty, you moved fast.

That was the first platform I ever used. Free, shared, time-limited, not mine. Sound familiar? Every platform I've ever built on since, Meerkat, LinkedIn, Giphy, Snapchat, had the same terms. You don't own the machine. You borrow time on it. The kid who waited for the library computer grew up to be early to every platform. Same instinct: when the seat is empty, sit down.

I didn't have a mentor. I had a building. A room full of shelves and a machine in the corner and nobody telling me what to read or what to click on.

Every interesting person I know has an origin story they're slightly embarrassed by. Not because it's shameful, but because it's too simple. Too unglamorous. Too true.

Mine is a library. The local one. The free one. The one with the mythology books that were too old for me, the romance novels that were too adult for me, and the computer that was always occupied.

The kid who wandered those shelves grew up to wander platforms, wander ideas, wander industries. Same verb. Same instinct. Bigger library.

I'm still doing it. Every day. The shelves just went digital.

— String

P.S. My daughter will have a library card before she has a screen. The library is the original infinite scroll, except it makes you smarter instead of sadder.