Year 1: State of the Wonderland

Some reflections on the first year of Cognitive Wonderland

I almost decided not to write this. I wasn't really feeling up to taking time to write a State of the Wonderland like I have in the past. Then I realized it doesn't need to be like the ones in the past. I can just do whatever I want. One of the perks of writing for my own weird little publication.

So the format is going to be different. I'm going to just stream of consciousness write some reflections looking back on my first year. This is going to be a lot less polished than my usual posts.

I've mentioned before, when I started on Substack, I didn't expect much. I didn't expect to publish weekly for long, I figured I'd fall off track pretty quickly. It's now over a year of publishing weekly.

I didn't know what to expect in terms of an audience—I assumed a small cast of recurring characters would occasionally comment and interact, but didn't expect more than that. Instead I have a pretty large cast of recurring characters—more than I dare try to name. Just know that if you interact with me (even if it's just "Liking" my posts or Notes regularly but never saying anything), I've noticed and appreciate you.

Since I was curious what growth looked like when I started, I've tried to be pretty transparent in the past. I'm going to continue here with some numbers and plots of subscriber growth, and then have some reflections below on my first year here.

The Numbers

On May 3, 2024, I ended the day with 4 Substack subscribers. On May 3, 2025, I ended the day with 4,174 Substack subscribers. That's a 1000x increase. If I extrapolate that trend, by next year I'll be the largest publication on Substack.

More seriously, here is the growth plot. You can see it's relatively steady—I haven't had any crazy viral Notes or articles that gave me a huge jump in a single day, but there definitely have been periods of faster or slower growth.

Here's daily growth (change in subscribers on a given day). It's easier to see the periods of faster and slower growth.

Interestingly, being larger hasn't led to exponentially faster growth. I've had some periods of fast growth and slow growth regardless of the publication’s size. Mostly I've learned to just not worry about it.

What comes next?

The wild thing about having achieved some level of success with this publication is I now have a platform. A small one, but a platform nonetheless. Writing is hard—both because it's work and it's just emotionally difficult to create something and see what the world thinks of it. Having a decent sized audience means I'm guaranteed to get some level of interaction with whatever I post. Every interaction is felt.

But now that I have a small platform, it's easier to do things like message someone who I think is interesting and quickly set up a time to livestream a conversation, and have over 50 people hop on to watch live. I can message people much more accomplished than myself for other forms of collaboration, like writing a guest-post.

The weekly newsletter remains the bread and butter and I have no plans to change that. But it's fun to be able to do other things as well. At the very least, I expect to continue to do Substack Live conversations, and possibly do them a bit more regularly—they're a fun, low-effort way to engage with other writers and create something interesting. I'm having fun producing some "supplementary content", and will likely do more exploration around this over time.

A reflection on what I'm doing here

It sounds dumb, but what spurred me to start this publication was literally coming across the term "cognitive wonder" in a review of a science fiction book. The term described a feeling that I was seeking, a sort of intellectual high that comes from learning. My first ever post was an attempt to articulate what I meant by it, and I've revisited the topic in other posts.

This isn't the sort of fleeting wonder you might get from learning some new facts. It's something deeper than that, a conceptual shift that comes with defamiliarization of common experiences. A new framework that makes you see the world with firstness, but organizes the world in a way that invites further questions. Understanding evolution by natural selection doesn't just give you a neat fact that stuff evolved. It gives you a framework for understanding how every living thing came to be, through understandable forces working together to create something new. There's no magic. The emerging design is the product of natural and understandable things—and that in itself is the magic. We can understand the pieces, pull them apart, and marvel at how this amazing thing—the horns of a rhino, the ion channels in a neuron, the navigation abilities of birds—came about through selection pressures, variation, and heritability. The world is full of stuff that seems too incredible for us to be able to wrap our heads around—and then we can go and wrap our heads around them. Everything we understand about the world is so amazing that they feel like they should be magic. The fact that they aren't—not in the supernatural sense—makes them all the more astounding.

Our lives are filled with people and words. But there's so much beneath the surface. When someone speaks to us, we just take it for granted that we hear and understand the words. But what's happening is incredible—their lungs are expelling gas, their vocal folds and articulators (tongue, lips, etc) making quick changes to create vibrations in that gas. Those vibrations hit a membrane in your ear, where the vibration is transferred into a mechanical motion that opens up ion channels leading to electrical signaling in your brain. Those electrical signals go through complicated processes in your brain to detect different sounds and words, eliciting a semantic understanding in your head that came from the head of the other person. We do this constantly and effortlessly.

We can have a conversation with someone and never think about any of this. Most people do! But when you start looking at the world with a different lens—the lens of sensory neuroscience—there's a conceptual shift. The complexity of what's going on all around us is suddenly apparent. The world is incredibly rich with wonder.

This sort of defamiliarization requires a conceptual framework. If you have no idea how our sensory systems work, you can only apply the most vague lens to looking at these kinds of things. Understanding the principles by which things work opens up the world to different lenses to be applied, and different ways to experience firstness and wonder. The richer your conceptual resources, the more cognitive doors you can explore.

That's what I'm trying to get at, here. Obviously I write about other topics—it would be boring to always tie everything back to feeling wonder at the defamiliarization that comes with understanding the world. But that's the guiding light.

In the past year, I've deepened my understanding of what that means. I've learned more about the psychology of awe and wonder. I've learned more about conceptualizations and scientific theories. I've learned more about what it means to understand and explain things. But I think I've stayed true to the original purpose of launching this thing.

That's it for now. Let's see what year 2 brings.