Epistemic drive is the enjoyment of acquiring knowledge, resolving uncertainty, and building coherent mental models.

The pleasure isn’t just finding out what is happening, or how it is done—it’s discovering how every piece relates to every other piece.

There are these:

Systems thinking: Understanding relationships and feedback within a whole system.
Integrative thinking: Combining many different pieces into one coherent picture.
Pattern recognition: Seeing recurring structures and connections.
Sensemaking: Taking scattered information and organizing it into a meaningful model.
Epistemic curiosity: Enjoying the process of discovering and understanding.

And frankly, if these do not describe me, what does.

I like discovering individual pieces through curiosity, then assembling them into a coherent whole.

I admit, some cases in The Brokenwood Mysteries, are exaggrated.

I mean, necessarily, not everyone comes out as dumb, in a family, if parents are dumb.

That being said, my husband has a theory. He says, the reason some cases in Brokenwood take longer to solve, is that the main suspects, or witnesses, are inadequate, and somewhat, well, unintelligent.

I agree. Stupid witness, suspect, friend, enemy, all make any pain last longer.

My husband has a strange / sweet / funny sense of humor. Honestly, all three, together. He owns them.

We were walking a tv show; well, starting to watch one. After 45 minutes, I asked what he thought of it.

He said, “honestly, I pity them. What a pathetic environment. Let’s find another tv show.”

He gets me. I love that.

She’s not driven by ambition.

She’s driven by peace.

Overthinking is often a sign that your intuition is trying to warn you, of something, but it cannot point a finger, yet.

My overthinking process was always right.

The brain / body / soul picks up the danger when it alarms you; but it cannot name it.

The brain loves unfinished stories.

They age like wine.

But the older you get, the easier it gets to just simply forget about them.

I admit getting older was more fun than anyone told me.

I wish I was older, back when I was surrounded by, you know, insufficient idiots. None of those pathetic thugs were worth any attention.

But then, you are younger, and you have more trust in people.

The unknown can be very powerful.

“Life is short, Miss Bennet; everything turns to dust, in the end. We might as well experience some joy before that happens.”

Mr. Ryder, The Other Bennet Sister.

Brains are strange little nighttime screenwriters.

One month, psychological horror; the next month, “what if everyone behaved normally for once?”

Human beings invented “joking questions” specifically to survive emotional vulnerability without exploding into dust like Victorian poets.