Campfire Learn Together: What Makes Life Worth Wondering on Sunday, May 10 · 10AM CT

For this Campfire Learn Together, we are watching philosopher Helen De Cruz talk with Robert Lawrence Kuhn about her book Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think — and thinking together about what wonder has to do with how we learn, how we survive, and why we’re here.

We take wonder seriously at Stimpunks. Our research series is called Facts, Fire, and Feels — and feels are in that title on purpose. We reject the idea that evidence and emotion are opposites. We hold both. We read the literature and we are moved by what it says. We bring data and we bring grief and we bring awe at the complexity of minds and the cruelty of systems and the persistence of people who keep showing up anyway.

De Cruz gives this a name. Wonder, she argues, is an epistemic emotion — an emotion whose primary function is knowledge-seeking. When something surprises us, when it doesn’t fit our existing framework, wonder is what pushes us to look harder. It’s not decorative. It’s structural. It’s how we get new knowledge at all.

That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with research that was built to exclude us. We don’t approach the literature neutrally. We approach it with wonder and with fire — with the questions that emerge from our own lives, from the gap between what research says and what we know. The people at the edges have always known things the mainstream gets around to confirming decades later. Wonder is what keeps us looking even when the field hasn’t caught up yet.

De Cruz also warns against the deadening of wonder — the utilitarian drift toward productivity and optimization that squeezes out the capacity to just stand in awe. That is a disability justice problem too. When systems reduce us to compliance targets and data points, they are not just failing to include us. They are destroying the conditions for wonder: the non-judgmental letting-things-impact-you that Descartes called the first of the passions, the cognitive accommodation that leaves room for something genuinely new to arrive.

We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole selves.

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Videos

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Join Us

Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.

We’ll watch together, take a bodymind break, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome.

Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect during a campfire session. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.

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Related Glossary Entries

• Alexithymia
• Bodymind
• Curiosity
• Epistemic Injustice
• Epistemic Niche Construction
• Evolution
• Flow
• Hyperfocus
• Monotropism
• Neurodiversity Paradigm
• Pathology Paradigm
• Psychological Safety
• Spiky Profile

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Reflection Questions

On wonder as an epistemic emotion

De Cruz describes wonder as fundamentally about knowledge-seeking — not a passive experience, but a push to investigate. When something surprises you, when it doesn’t fit any framework you have, wonder is what makes you go looking. She calls this cognitive accommodation: the process of restructuring your understanding to make room for what just arrived.

At Stimpunks, we describe our research approach with three words: facts, fire, and feels. De Cruz’s argument suggests these aren’t three separate things but one integrated epistemic posture. The feel of being moved by evidence is what makes the evidence matter. When have you experienced wonder as a driver of your own learning — not inspiration in the Instagram sense, but genuine cognitive disruption that made you want to know more? What caused it, and what did you do with it?

On wonder and awe as different things

De Cruz distinguishes between wonder — a push to investigate something that surprises and puzzles you — and awe, which carries a dimension of vastness, of something so much bigger than you that you don’t immediately know how to begin. Wonder wants to understand. Awe makes you stop and stand in the presence of something immense.

Many neurodivergent people describe intense, specific wonder — the deep-dive into a subject until you understand its structure completely — alongside awe at things most people walk past without noticing: frost patterns on glass, the mathematical texture of something ordinary. Where do you find your wonder? Where do you find your awe? Are they in the same places, or different ones?

On wonder as self-transcendence

De Cruz argues that wonder, like compassion and love, is self-transcendent — it moves you outside yourself. When you’re wondering, it’s not about you anymore. It’s about the thing you’re wondering at. This is different from the experience of wonder as comfortable or pleasant. Real wonder is disorienting. It creates a gap.

We talk at Stimpunks about the positionality of research — about how who is asking shapes what gets found. Wonder, in De Cruz’s framing, is what makes genuine inquiry possible: the willingness to let something impact you before you rush to have an opinion about it. Descartes called this the first of the passions, a kind of non-judgmental receptivity. What would it mean to bring that to how we read research? To let a study actually land before we decide what it means?

On wonder as ordinary, not special

Diary studies show that wonder and awe are not rare events reserved for people who do spectacular things. They happen regularly, across all professions, across all circumstances. A janitor experiences wonder and awe. A caregiver experiences wonder and awe. Frost on a window is enough. Wonder doesn’t require a James Webb telescope.

This matters for how we think about access. If wonder is ordinary — a basic feature of human life rather than a luxury of the educated or advantaged — then systems that grind it out of people are doing something serious. Schools that reduce learning to compliance. Work environments that leave no room for curiosity. Therapeutic frameworks that measure success by how well someone manages their own responses. What conditions does wonder require? What do current systems do to those conditions?

On cultivating wonder

De Cruz draws on Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Jewish concept of radical amazement — the idea that wonder can be cultivated, that specific practices can make you more attuned to what is wondrous. She also warns that you can’t manufacture wonder instrumentally: using it purely as a productivity tool dissolves it. You have to approach it with earnestness. The openness has to be real.

Campfire itself is a practice of this kind. We don’t watch things together to extract insights. We watch things together because being curious in community is different from being curious alone. What practices in your own life cultivate your capacity for wonder? What kills it? And what does it mean to protect that capacity in yourself when the world keeps optimizing for efficiency instead?

On science as a source of wonder

De Cruz addresses the concern that science dispels wonder — that once you understand something, the magic is gone. She finds this unconvincing. Science is a major source of wonder, she argues, because it keeps surfacing things we didn’t know were the case. The James Webb telescope images hit everyone at once. That’s a shared experience of awe. Science doesn’t close the gap between what we know and what we don’t; it opens it wider.

At Stimpunks, we follow the evidence and we hold it critically. We know research isn’t neutral. We know who funds it shapes what it finds. But we also believe that some of it changes things — that some studies name what we already knew but couldn’t yet prove, and hand us language and leverage. What research has moved you? What study landed differently because you came to it already wondering?

On the shared experience of wonder

De Cruz describes the James Webb telescope images as a beautiful shared experience — everyone wondering at the same time. Wonder, in that moment, was collective. It happened to many people simultaneously and in community.

Campfire is built on this premise. We watch together because something about shared attention creates something that individual attention doesn’t. The thing you notice changes when others are noticing too. When have you experienced wonder collectively — not just coincidentally in the same room, but actually together, the wonder moving between people? What made that possible?

On wonder as resilience

De Cruz invokes Rachel Carson: wonder is a source of resilience. It is something you can draw strength from. Not toxic positivity, not the demand to be grateful when things are genuinely hard — but the capacity to be moved by something outside yourself even when things inside are difficult. Carson developed this idea while living with cancer and writing for children. She knew what she was talking about.

Neurodivergent and disabled people are often told to focus on coping strategies — how to manage, how to function, how to adapt to systems that weren’t designed for them. Wonder is something else. It’s not about adaptation. It’s about retaining the capacity to be genuinely affected by the world. What has sustained your wonder during hard stretches? How do you hold onto it when systems are actively grinding against you?

On the utilitarian drift

De Cruz names something happening right now: people seeing themselves in increasingly utilitarian terms. Jump through the hoops. Buy the house. Maximize efficiency. And AI is accelerating it — the conversation about AI is almost entirely about productivity gains, about optimizing outputs. The question she asks is: for what? What are we doing it for?

Disability justice has always asked this question. The productivity frame excludes people whose contribution doesn’t fit the metric. When we say “broken systems, not broken people,” part of what we mean is that the system’s definition of what counts as functioning is too narrow. Wonder doesn’t optimize. It wanders. It notices what the efficiency frame can’t see. What gets lost when we let the optimization frame dominate? What does wonder recover?

On firstness

De Cruz draws on Descartes’ account of wonder as seeing something for the first time, or seeing it as if for the first time. Robert Kuhn describes watching his granddaughter discover that you can go around a chair rather than through it — and experiencing awe at that moment of first learning. Wonder, in this account, requires a kind of freshness, an ability to let something be new.

Many neurodivergent people describe a particular relationship to this: the deep sense of noticing things others have stopped seeing, the continued wonder at things that have become invisible to others through familiarity. But systems often pathologize this — call it perseveration, rigidity, being “stuck.” What would it mean to honor the firstness that many neurodivergent people carry rather than treating it as a problem to be solved?

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Main Takeaways

• Wonder is an epistemic emotion. Its function is knowledge-seeking. It is not decorative — it is structural to how we learn anything genuinely new.
• Wonder pushes you to investigate. Awe makes you stop and stand in the presence of something vastly larger than you. They are related but different. Both matter.
• Cognitive accommodation is what happens when something doesn’t fit your existing framework and you have to restructure to make room for it. Wonder is what motivates that work.
• Wonder is self-transcendent: it moves you outside yourself. When you’re truly wondering, it’s not about you anymore. It’s about the thing you’re wondering at.
• Wonder is ordinary. Diary studies show it happens regularly, to everyone, across all professions and circumstances. Frost on a window is enough. Extraordinary moments help, but wonder doesn’t require them.
• You can cultivate wonder but not manufacture it. Practices — religious, communal, contemplative — can make you more attuned to what is wondrous. But you have to approach them with earnestness. Instrumentalizing wonder destroys it.
• Science doesn’t dispel wonder — it amplifies it. Every answer opens more questions. The James Webb telescope made millions of people wonder at the same time. That’s what science does at its best.
• Shared wonder is different from private wonder. Something happens when many people are attending to the same thing at the same time. Campfire is built on this.
• Wonder is a source of resilience — not toxic positivity, not mandatory gratitude, but the capacity to be genuinely moved by something outside yourself even when things inside are hard. Rachel Carson understood this while living with cancer.
• We are in a utilitarian drift — toward productivity, optimization, efficiency. AI is accelerating it. De Cruz asks: for what? Disability justice has always asked the same question.
• Systems that eliminate wonder — that reduce learning to compliance, work to output, and people to metrics — are not just inefficient. They are doing something serious to human beings.
• Wonder requires firstness: seeing something for the first time, or as if for the first time. Many neurodivergent people carry this. Systems call it perseveration. It might be a form of epistemic attentiveness that the mainstream has lost.
• Facts, fire, and feels are not three separate things. They are one integrated epistemic posture. The feel of being moved is what makes evidence matter. Wonder is what keeps us looking.