In the past couple of months, I've been in an increasing number of conversations about curiosity. It's become my go-to piece of advice. In fact, it's the only piece of advice I can give with unwavering confidence.
The catalyst for writing this post was a brilliant article by
. I highly recommend reading it thrice. I'd like to highlight a few excerpts that particularly resonated with me:One thing I mastered in failing to get a Ph.D. was an ability to research things for their own sake. That is, I never learned how to properly research anything at all; I just mutated procrastination into a taste for curiosity in itself and would search not for answers to any specific problems but for further questions. One book would lead to fifteen others, and so on, and I never got anywhere close to organizing any of my “findings” or even developing a dissertation topic. I just wanted to be lost in the library, and I’ve been a dilettante ever since.
As Chiang insists, the point of art (or education, or thinking, or living) is to be confronted with intentionality — with irrefutable proof of subjectivity, the fact that something “derives from … unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing [a] work” — and to draw from it the energy to enhance your own, to sustain the will to will. You decide to be present for something, and try to make the effort to come to terms with the presence of another subjectivity that is more than just a projection of your own. That presence of mind is itself thinking, the basic unit of intentionality. Tech companies seems adamant in insisting they can make money by extinguishing it.
Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.
I've always been hesitant to call myself curious because I think there's a higher bar to claiming curiosity. I believe you need to have a lot of smarts, which I don't. Or perhaps it's just my raging impostor syndrome acting up.
Instead, I always tell people I enjoy knowing random facts. This is partly due to my dad, who never got a chance to explore random topics when he was growing up. His family was like Ocean's Eleven if it had an all-star cast of assholes. So he always put a premium on me and my brother knowing about as many things as possible, and to the best of his abilities, he created that environment for us. I can't describe how privileged and lucky I am for this.
Throughout my life, I never lost that voice that goes, "Ooh, that's interesting" whenever I read or watched something I didn't know about. It's about the only thing I have going for me in life. Goalless exploration of random things is deeply fulfilling. This is what makes life fun for me—that there's always another weird and random thing for me to read and write about.
My definition of heaven is a good book or article, a place to sit, and a strong cup of filter coffee.
But when I see people around me, they’re the exact opposite. In fact, most people are the embodiment of old Bertrand Russell’s pithy banger:
“Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!”
It's stunning to me that there's such widespread incuriosity. People seem to be content living life as if they were zombies just going through the motions. That people are okay not knowing things is incomprehensible to me.
In people's defense, it's a tough world out there. Our information ecosystems are weird. They're designed to put blinders on people and push them to consume generic, anodyne, and surface-level bullshit.
We no longer read books; we read summaries. We no longer watch videos; we watch shorts. We no longer read long-form articles; we click the TLDR button. We no longer go looking for things; we ask an LLM. The default meal on the menu is slop, and people have gotten so used to eating it that they think that's all there is. They don't know that there's Puliyogare and Vangi Bath waiting for them out there.
Today, to reject the slop and go out of one's way to find something interesting feels like a revolutionary act. That's a tragedy. It's precisely why I love the whole idea of a digital garden. I think the only way to be sane in this world is to be thoughtful and deliberate about what you let into your brain. And for that, you need to let in garbage first.
Without knowing the bad, you can never know the good. There are thousands of varieties of garbage, and to know all of them, you again need to do the same damn thing—explore randomly.
Reading Rob’s post reminded me of two brilliant posts. The first one was “Research as a way of life” by
and the second was “Research as leisure activity” by —two of the best posts I’ve read all year.The newsletter Olga is referring to is Celine’s post:
You might be wondering, when during the week do I have time for leisure? Or when is it my time to do research as a leisure activity? Turns out, the real reason I broke down reading the newsletter is because of the realization of just how little time I currently have in my life for leisure and for research.
The feelings of guilt hit when I started thinking of how little time I had spent over the last 8 years doing what brings me joy and purpose. Thoughts like “I wasted 8 years of my life not doing what I love” or “You will never get that time back” or “You wasted so much time away.” None of those thoughts are new, but the connection between research, leisure, and time struck a speciaTl cord. It combined two of the most important things in my life, that have not been taking anywhere near enough time in my life. I value leisure and research so much so that I want to build my entire life around those two things as well as food, culture, sharing, and community. At that moment, I felt nowhere near having that life.
I can 100% relate to the feeling she's having. It was less intense, but I was also struck with a profound amount of guilt and sadness a few years ago when it suddenly dawned on me that I had lost my habit of reading books. It wasn't just about reading books, because the way I think of books is as portals and rabbit holes. The fewer books I read, the fewer rabbit holes I go down.
For as long as I could remember, reading was one thing that kept me sane even as my life continued to take one miserable turn after the other. It was as if I dared life to make it worse, and life said, "Challenge accepted." But despite the shitty days, I was still okay because I always had a book waiting for me at home. In fact, a few books were all I had for long stretches of my otherwise tumultuous life.
This excerpt from Celine's post encapsulates a key aspect of what it means to live a meaningful life for me:
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.
And when you talk about curiosity, you can’t not talk about
. A few snippets from one of his podcast appearances:Tom Morgan: It's a wild thing to me that we use the word "curiosity" all the time. When you ask people, "Why are you interested in that?", we all know that you're interested in very different things than I am. It's personal - certain things are more interesting to some people than others.
Generally speaking, there will be stuff that I care about that bores my wife to tears. My wife loves The Real Housewives, adores it. I would rather stick pins in my eyes than watch 10 minutes of The Real Housewives. Likewise, there's so much stuff - literally any book I read - that my wife would kill herself rather than read. It's really different, which implies that there's some aspect of personalization to this.
Every single person I know who's happy is relentlessly curious, and there's actually a lot of data behind this. My favorite is probably a study of 30 years of wisdom research. "Wisdom" is an awful word, but all you need to know about wisdom is that it correlates with hedonic and eudaimonic flourishing, which just means how much you're growing and how happy you are. Wisdom correlates very tightly with the Big Five trait of openness. How open you are to new ideas determines your flourishing and your happiness.
You can think about that from a thermodynamic perspective. If you're in a rut, if you're in a boring place, opening yourself up to new ideas is great. But opening yourself up to new ideas that excite you - think of that word, they excite you, they raise your energy level - just seems like a great way to live your life. Curious people tend to be way more energized than other people. So you can see, wherever this comes from, it's a good thing.
Justin Castelli: Does it matter where it comes from?
Tom Morgan: I don't know, man. I think one of the big problems is that curiosity is intuitive, somatic, and not logical, while our lives are logical, linear, and rational - often to a fault. In America, you've got a lot of structural constraints - health insurance, mortgages, all of these things that prevent you from following your curiosity.
And if - and this is a big if - curiosity is correlated to your ability to flourish in life, then if there is a more robust theory of curiosity, I think it can help people take risks with their life free from the fear that they're just doing something dumb.
Justin Castelli: What do you think about passion? Is it crap? Is it meaningful? What does passion mean to you in the way you look at things?
Tom Morgan: Yeah, I think it's kind of the same. I use them interchangeably - your interests, your passions, your curiosity. Because once you've gotten curious about something, if it then becomes the right thing, you become passionate about it.
You can be curious about something, a rabbit hole opens, you get into it, and you're like, "Yeah, no, that wasn't what I thought it was. I'm not interested in moving on." I think to your point, as you said earlier, there's kind of this analytical side that kicks in once you've found the shiny new thing. It's like, "Is this really a good use of my time? No, probably not. Is this really going to lead anywhere? No, probably not."
You have to exercise some discernment with that. Otherwise, you're just going to be running down dumb rabbit holes for the rest of your life. While also holding this impossible tension that you can't tell where the leaps of faith are going to work out, because curiosity is not driven by rationality. You can't see one step ahead.
That’s it for this week. Go read some terrible.
This is such a calmful read (with access to tailored and independent thought pieces!) And somehow it doesn't feel lonely anymore. :)
Great reflection. Keep the curiosity burning!