Are you really okay being this incurious?
Age of deliberate ignorance
This is less of a well thought out post and more of a weird, non-flowy stream of consciousness. You have been warned.
Why are people so incurious?
How are so many people ok not knowing so many things?
This is a question that's been at the back of my head for some time now.
I'm talking about the desire to know something. So you can call it curiosity, wonder, awe, or anything else. Despite the differences in meaning, I don't want to get into a semantic wrestling match.
I've been thinking about this because, for some reason, I started noticing that a lot of people around me are ok, not knowing a lot of things. In fact, they've deliberately made the choice not to explore. This was bothering me because I don't know what that feels like. I'm more or less talking about reading. Not just books but all forms of reading.
Why would people be okay not knowing something?
I don't get it. What's the point of life if it doesn't involve a deep desire to discover weird and wonderful things? Is that life even worth living?
This isn't going to be one of those ego masturbatory posts about wisdom or philosophy or some other douchey bullshit, even though I'm not past it. But it's a genuine question, and it's really bothering me.
I've only noticed this phenomenon in my circles, but like any sane person on the internet, I am going to generalize this across society even though I don't have data. I guess you could say that I'm talking about a vibe. But luckily, it's not just me who thinks this:
That a post titled “No one buys books” went viral shows that this vibe about incuriosity is fairly widespread. Even though the post was quickly debunked, the fact that it was so widely shared meant that the writer struck a raw nerve.
Of course, a vast majority of people have always been content to go through the motions of life like zombies. But it seems to me like more and more people are becoming intellectual zombies. They are willingly committing intellectual harakiri, or lobotomy, if you will.
It also seems like the stench of a certain kind of intellectual nihilism is thick in the air. It's not solipsism either. It's either a dumb form of intellectual laziness or downright intellectual apathy. I can't quite figure which.
One of the greatest gifts I ever got in life is an environment where my dad put a premium on intellectual development—both wordy and worldly. If I hadn't grown up in such an environment, I'd probably be as smart as an expired bottle of Hajmola tablets.
But a lot of people I meet and talk to are ok being as smart as a dry cucumber. They can't say something interesting even by accident.
What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't look forward to discovering The Lord of The Rings and marveling at how the fuck Tolkien imagined such a rich world of fantasy, or staring awkwardly at people's toes for clues after reading Sherlock Holmes, or discovering some German dude called Hegel for the first time and thinking was he high on cheap skunk weed when he wrote whatever the fuck he wrote, or feeling that existential gut-punch when you discover Byung-Chul Han, or feeling that righteous anger and urge to start a fucking revolution after reading an introduction to Marx, or losing yourself in the maddening delights and oneiric reveries of Gaston Bachelard, or learning about the backstory of our fractured world in Adam Tooze's Crashed, or trying to grasp what Tracy Smith means when she says poetry is about expressing "the feelings that defy language", or feeling a deep ache in your heart when you translate Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's “A Brook of the Scarpe”?
What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't look forward to discovering the magical world that's waiting for us in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Books of Earthsea, or the madness in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or the feeling of reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather for the second time, or wondering why Amartya Sen titled his book Home in the World, or slouching as you read Brad DeLong's Slouching Toward Utopia, or learning about the great booms and busts that William Quinn wants to tell us about?
What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't laugh out loud at the endless sexual escapades and divinely human follies of the gods in Stephen Fry's Mythos series, or feel the pain of the homeless Uyghurs through their poems, or marvel at the lyrical beauty of the French poets and be startled at their weird French...ness, or wrestle with the "conflict of dharma" that Kaushik Basu reveals in his translation of the epic Mahabharata, or feel a sense of reverence wash over you and fill you with awe as you read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, or look forward to raging against the machine after reading Yann Moulier-Boutang's Cognitive Capitalism, or get incandescent with anger after reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, or go on a galactic journey with Asimov's Foundation?
What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't feel the urge to grab that book from your bookshelf or order a copy the moment someone you admire mentions it? What's the whole fucking point of life if you aren't constantly tortured by your own stupidity of ordering books faster than you can read them and haunted by the fucking regret that you won't be able to read them all?
What's the reason behind this supposed incuriosity?
To be honest, I don't know.
I'm not going to do the whole shtick about blaming phones, social media, reels, YouTube, or whatever for rotting our brains. I say that even as I involuntarily pick up my phone and check absolutely nothing four times. The whole blaming phones and social media is a well-trodden path filled with controversy [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], and I am comfortable watching other people duke it out.
I'm also not going to masturbate eloquently about the endless virtues of reading books. To each their own. Books don't have to sell themselves. It's for people to discover them and then find what they want and feel how they feel.
It could also be the case that we are overtly dogmatic about the “virtues of books.” Could it be the case that the form of a book is an anachronism in this age despite the fact that book sales continue to be steady and e-books haven’t yet murdered physical books? After all, people are now writing books on Substack.
People have access to so much information in so many formats today that they can construct their own information diet that gives them the same thing that people 100 years ago used to get from reading books. This tweet is emblematic of this line of thinking. I want to be clear that I make no value judgment.
Or, as the amazing
put it in this insanely brilliant post, entire generations have become intellectually stunted because of “industrial education.”To learn to think with language, to become literate in the sense of linguistically sophisticated, you must work hard to unlearn everything built on the foundation of literacy-as-reading-and-writing.
Because modern education is not designed to produce literate people. It is designed to produce programmable people. And this programmability requires less real literacy with every passing year. Today, genuinely literate reading and writing are specialized arts. Increasingly, even narrowly instrumental read-write literacy is becoming unnecessary (computers can do both very well).
These are not stupid people. You only have to listen to a child delightedly reciting supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or indulging in other childish forms of word-play to realize that raw skill with language is a native capability in the human brain. It must be repressed by industrial education since it seeks natural expression.
So these are not stupid people. These are merely ordinary people who have been lobotomized via the consumerization of language, delivered via modern education.
Or as the Raylan Givens said in the show Justified:
If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.
Maybe it's just the case that people I hang out with are the problem and the rest of the world is fine. Seems plausible.
What do you think?
Loved your rant - although I think the incurious are the losers, really.
I sympathize with every word.