A strange thing happens when you see something every day: Eventually, you stop seeing it. A building you once admired becomes part of your commute. The trees on your block become background. Your favorite coffee mug becomes something you reach for without thinking.

This tendency has been compounded by a culture that encourages us to move through life as efficiently as possible: We follow directions instead of wandering, put in headphones instead of listening to the world around us, and fill spare moments by looking at our phone. As Ian Bogost writes in a new article, we’ve become so focused on making life more productive that we risk treating the present as mere preparation for whatever comes next.

Wonder can interrupt that habit, Bogost argues—not just the kind inspired by mountains or sunsets, but the kind available in ordinary things. He describes noticing the warmth of a coffee mug, the crunch of gravel underfoot, and the clever engineering of a toaster. Wonder, in this sense, is less about seeking out extraordinary experiences than it is about paying close attention to the ones already around you.

On Finding Wonder

The Missing Ingredient of Modern Life

By Ian Bogost

Why we need wonder

Read the article.

The Ordinary Miracle of Existing

By Alan Lightman

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience.

Read the article.

The Cult of Delayed Gratification Is a Lie

By Ian Bogost

The sensory enchantment of everyday life can upend the bland monotony of our overly optimized, anodyne world.

Read the article.

Want more wonder in your days? Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s newsletter on making everyday life vivid.

Still Curious?

• The quiet profundity of everyday awe: That feeling—of being in the presence of something vast—is good for us. And, counterintuitively, it can often be found in completely unremarkable circumstances, Dacher Keltner wrote in 2023.
• The hidden cost of optimizing everything: Ian Bogost talks with Charlie Warzel on his podcast, Galaxy Brain, about how technology is disconnecting us from life’s small pleasures.

Other Diversions

• Gloria Steinem: “Everything we do matters.”
• How “somatics” became the solution to modern life
• The dark side of mindfulness

PS

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Last week, Nick M. shared a picture of Yosemite National Park on a summer morning.

We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Rafaela

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not how shall

I correct it?

Why yes, I have worried about that: Will the natural order of things suddenly turn against itself? And what can I, a small, unremarkable being, do to fix it? The poem’s troubles go on to cover aging, illness, regret. And then, with a sigh, it resolves itself. “Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. / And I gave it up. And took my old body / and went out into the morning, / and sang.”

Much of Oliver’s now-famed poetry, including “I Worried,” sidles up right next to the reader, assumes a strong kinship, and then doles out a dollop of wisdom that might be interpreted as advice. Oliver rarely commands, but she frequently—especially in her most-shared work—offers statements or questions that read as counsel for the weary. Among many other examples, she slips “instructions for living a life” inside her poem “Sometimes”: “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” “You do not have to be good,” begins the oft-quoted “Wild Geese.” And there is her more graceful take on YOLO, from “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Prompts such as these turned Oliver from a celebrated scribbler in the 1990s to a lyrical sage in the aughts to today’s still-reigning poet laureate of Pinterest. Her juiciest bits of guidance bounce around on social media like Mel Robbins quotes and are sold on mugs and T-shirts. There’s the burgundy corduroy cap that reads Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. and the bumper sticker (from the official Mary Oliver Shop) emblazoned with Joy is not made to be a crumb.

An upcoming PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, knows that popularity has made the artist’s reputation fraught, as popularity often does. It gently considers the question of whether someone so beloved by poetry neophytes can also earn the adulation of the critic class. As the writer Ruth Franklin points out in the film, Oliver never received a full-length review from The New York Times during her decades-long publishing career, even though that career included a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Award. The attention eventually paid to her work seemed to come with an asterisk, as if to designate it as beloved and therefore depthless. In a 2025 essay titled “Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?,” the poet Maggie Millner argued that Oliver’s critics have “a discomfort with her work’s digestibility, earnestness, and apparent disinterest in other people—and a fear about what the popularity of such work might say about them.”

Then again, what critics of Oliver’s work and celebrity might really fear is that the platitudes have become detached from the poems, that all those feel-good lines aren’t appreciated as poetry. The medium has always been delightfully co-opted this way. Even those who rarely touch poetry can probably name a few sayings that initially came from the medium, such as “a thing of beauty is a joy forever” (from Keats) and even “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink” (a modification of Coleridge). But when a line of poetry zooms off from the rest of its body, it can’t lift up the whole of the genre with it—and poetry, with its quiet place in the literary firmament, would probably like all the boosterism it can get.

The people who have turned Oliver into their patron saint of undecorated wisdom don’t seem to care whether the literary establishment is on board. Some of the reasons for their reverent following? The advice Oliver offers was hard-earned—throughout a difficult childhood and a long struggle to have her poetry widely read—and didn’t come off as self-help opportunism. Her work, much of which is concerned with the natural world she observed on daily walks in Cape Cod, was personal but never self-obsessed. It left a small but meaningful space for the reader to step into.

Saved by the Beauty of the World provides the broad strokes of Oliver’s life. Raised in Ohio in the 1930s and ’40s, she grew up in a “very dark and broken house” where she suffered at the hands of her father; the woods and fields offered escape. She briefly attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, then worked at the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s upstate New York home, tried out Greenwich Village, and landed in her 20s in Provincetown, on Cape Cod’s tip, where she stayed almost until the last years of her long life (most of them spent with her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook). Oliver’s career didn’t explode until her Pulitzer win, in 1984, when she was 49. Before that, she worked at an military-surplus store and did typing for figures such as Norman Mailer; after, she was sought by rafts of admirers, including readers and the students she taught at various institutions, but maintained a private, almost elusive, existence, granting few interviews.

The work Oliver created over five decades isn’t as easily summarized as some of her detractors might say, though it does dwell on a few central themes. There is her earthy imagery—the song of the wren, the “gladness” of the beeches and the oaks and the pines, the glory of an August day. She is a high priestess of the ordinary—not someone who revels in trips to the dentist or afternoons spent giving kids lice treatments, but in finding grace in the fact that life is made of simple moments. The umbrella hanging over all of her writing is her penchant for observing and absorbing—as she puts it so perfectly, “attention is the beginning of devotion”—and her encouragement of her readers to do the same. The poetry is an attempt to ask, over and over, What am I supposed to do? It’s also, sometimes, an answer to that question.

[Mary Oliver: Lilies]

Advice isn’t hard to come by these days: Fit-looking 40-something Instagrammers tell you how to slim down your middle-aged body; columns on manners and ethics or other interpersonal quandaries fill every big-name magazine and newspaper. And yet there is an (often unspoken) assertion that poetry ought not to give advice, that it should exult in the ambiguous. Poetry, perhaps more than any other writing genre, is unfairly assigned a value that is in direct opposition to its usefulness.

In an essay about O, the Oprah Magazine’s poetry issue, the critic David Orr snidely remarked of Oliver’s poetry, “One can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it”; he also declared, “There’s a bunch of talk about using poetry to overcome personal challenges (if it worked as self-help, you’d see more poets driving BMWs).” But poetry, like any other writing, is allowed to work toward a goal—so long as it doesn’t lose its structural integrity. Perhaps the problem isn’t that poetry fails to help one overcome challenges, but that its reputation doesn’t give it enough credit for that very thing. (If it did, Ada Limón and Kate Baer might have Z4 Roadsters of their own.)

Even after allowing that poetry can of course offer advice, the question of whether Oliver’s advice is any good is worth debating. I quibble with her notion that one could easily give up worrying: SSRI-usage rates are too high for that to feel possible. And I wonder what she means, exactly, by “good” when she says, “You do not have to be good,” in “Wild Geese”—her next line likens it to walking “on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting,” but surely the matter of goodness involves a more complicated definition than just self-flagellation. Other lines seem so undoubtedly true that it’s no wonder they’ve ended up on apparel. She ends her poem “When Death Comes” with, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Do any of us? If poetry is, at least partly, the art of minute observation, Oliver’s work might come off as trite when it expounds so universally.

The claim her friends and admirers make in Saved by the Beauty of the World is that none of this was straightforward for Oliver, either. She wasn’t some sage from on high but a flesh-and-blood woman who struggled through heartache and counted her dollars and was occasionally, as her friend John Waters puts it, a “shit-stirrer.” Oliver professed herself an admirer of Walt Whitman, but the documentary suggests that she may have been more like his contemporary (and poetic opposite) Emily Dickinson—a woman who set herself apart from the world in order to make better sense of it on paper.

Oliver’s poetry was not an act of ease; instead, she rebelled against the way that life presses our head down, away from the wonders of the world. Her advice, for all of its lucidity, is not uncomplicated or effortless. It’s to do something so difficult that most people don’t even attempt it: to notice when we’ve wandered away from how we want to live and to nudge ourselves back. “There are things you cannot reach. But,” she writes, “you can reach out to them, and all day long.” And for that, I’m grateful to have Mary Oliver’s words floating around my Pinterest page. I’d rather live the questioning life of an Oliver acolyte than the certain life of her critics.

No less an authority than Sam Altman is arguing that we are in an AI bubble. The International Monetary Fund is citing it as a significant risk to financial stability and warning about what might happen when it bursts: diminished investment, tighter credit, reduced consumption, disrupted trade flows.

That’s pretty much what happens when any bubble pops, as a Dutch tulip obsessive could have told you in 1637 or a bitcoin evangelist could have told you in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2018, or 2022. Yet the AI bubble is no ordinary bubble. Hyper-rich corporations are stoking it, rather than kitchen-table investors. They’re blowing it up when credit is fairly expensive, not dirt cheap. That might make the bubble less fragile and longer lasting than those of the past. But it won’t make it any less painful when it pops.

The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the late aughts were remarkably broad-based compared with the AI bubble today. Uncle Ted got a hulking desktop computer, opened a newfangled E*TRADE account, and started day-trading shares in Apple and Pets.com. The share of American households owning equities climbed 13 percentage points from 1995 to 2001, during which time more than 2,752 firms went public (far more than the 730 operating businesses that have IPOed in the last six years). A half decade later, Aunt Linda bought a condo with nothing down, flipped it, and mortgaged three new investment properties in the Phoenix suburbs, sight unseen. The homeownership rate rose 5 percentage points as the housing bubble inflated; 40 percent of mortgages issued at its height went to investment or vacation properties.

In both cases, regular people were staking their savings on what seemed like a winning bet: the internet changing everything, housing prices never going down. In both cases, cheap credit fueled the irrational exuberance. Low interest rates let venture capitalists fund nonsense web businesses and let banks provide junk loans to borrowers with terrible credit. In both cases, rising interest rates popped the bubble.

Today, Uncle Ted and Aunt Linda aren’t really getting in on the AI frenzy. The share of Americans who own stocks has held steady. Household debt has grown, but it has fallen relative to disposable income and GDP. Everybody seems to know someone who was personally burned by the dot-com collapse and the housing crisis. How many people know someone who’s staking it all on OpenAI and Anthropic today? (The companies aren’t public, after all.) Indeed, how many people know someone whose livelihood has been directly affected by the AI frenzy at all?

The insularity of the AI bubble isn’t the only thing that makes it unusual, and we should probably think about it as two overlapping bubbles instead of just one. AI is driving tremendous spending on capital expenditures—physical infrastructure, software development. And it is driving a tremendous run-up in company valuations.

Digital innovations don’t tend to require a ton of labor or heavy equipment. The companies offering them tend to be capital-light, like marketers and insurers, rather than capital-intensive, like airlines and hotel chains. But AI is different. A start-up might need thousands of times as much computing power to train an algorithm as it would need to develop a conventional software product. To get that power, Silicon Valley is building 1,500 data centers in the United States and counting, and purchasing a mammoth quantity of semiconductor chips. (The Wall Street Journal calls these chips “the 21st century’s most important market.”) Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta alone are spending more than $700 billion on the build-out this year. AI-infrastructure investment is responsible for essentially all American GDP growth at the moment. Without it, in other words, we might be in a recession.

The boom is lifting the value of farmland, driving up the cost of construction employment, and flushing huge sums to water and electrical utilities. Still, tech companies are the main beneficiaries: NVIDIA is selling chips to Meta; Amazon is selling cloud-computing capacity to OpenAI. This surge in revenue, and the excitement about the money to be made when AI starts bolstering productivity and profits, is driving up valuations. The Magnificent Seven—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—now account for one-third of the value of the Standard & Poor’s 500. OpenAI is worth more than Eli Lilly, JPMorgan Chase, Visa, Costco, Exxon Mobil, Wells Fargo, CVS Health, McDonald’s, and Boeing.

Tech companies are going to need to start generating huge revenues and huge profits to justify these valuations. OpenAI needs to spin up roughly $100 billion in free cash flow by 2030, according to calculations by Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook. Analysts expect it will lose $10 billion to $30 billion that year. If it does—or if more communities ban data centers, or if non-tech companies prove reticent about purchasing AI software, or if China develops AI models that do not require so much computing power—we could be in for a massive correction. The AI economy is a trillion-dollar ouroboros of buying and selling, investment and equity staking, all happening between San Francisco and San Jose. Big Tech is advancing money to AI start-ups to buy cloud services from Big Tech, which is using the revenue to run new AI models … you get the idea. What happens to one firm could happen to all of them.

Tech companies are also going to need to start generating even bigger revenues and profits to pay off their debts. In the early days of AI, venture capitalists, wealthy individuals, and Big Tech firms used hard cash to invest in the new technology. But the build-out has proven so expensive that Silicon Valley has turned to corporate bonds and private credit, meaning loans made by entities other than banks. Thus, though the AI boom has happened while interest rates are fairly high, it still involves a lot of leverage. The deals are complicated, opaque, and structured so as to be invisible on traditional balance sheets, making the “ultimate distribution of risk less transparent,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh of Columbia Business School has found. Already, lenders are getting queasy—“buy-side indigestion,” as Morningstar describes the market’s recent reticence to meet Silicon Valley’s demands.

When the bubble bursts, Uncle Ted and Aunt Linda will be affected, even if they were never the ones stoking the frenzy. Their retirement plans and pensions are invested in Silicon Valley stocks that could drop; their small businesses are reliant on access to credit that might get throttled. But, hey, there’s always the possibility that AI might steal their job before any of that happens.