The Point of Curiosity
Ah! I haven’t lost you yet! Did you check out the preface yet? If so, I hope you’ve checked out the contents. There may be a lot there — depends on your perspective. But we’ve probably established that you are pretty curious. You came here and are still here.
I know, I’m belaboring a point.
There’s a point?
Yes. There is.
And, it is about curiosity. The thing about it is that it makes us pay closer attention to many things, as mentioned above. We can’t pay attention to everything. Our nervous systems couldn’t handle that. In fact, our nervous system evolved to run a lot of our systems on autopilot. So that we wouldn’t have to pay attention to our blood pressure, or our breathing, or our heart rate, or all of the neurons firing throughout our nervous systems. It frees us up to pay attention to other things.
So what can we pay attention to? There’s just so much in this space-time period. The best TV, music, films, books, podcasts, plays. It’s all available to us almost anytime we want it and almost anywhere we are. Thousands of years of ideas, history, science, poetry. And social media. All also accessible always everywhere.
It can be overwhelming. Good thing our nervous system is running autopilot for all that stuff in our bodies.
So maybe the question is what should we pay attention to? No easy answer there. I can’t tell you. But this is where we come back to curiosity. We should all pay attention to the things we are curious about. That sounds like an easy answer. But it isn’t. If we unpack it.
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So, just pay attention to what you’re curious about. That’s the first thing. Pretty simple. But, out of curiosity, how do you know what makes you curious? Is it the thing itself? Is it your natural interests? Are those interests natural or learned? Is it the culture you live in? Is it the way something is presented? Can you be manipulated to feel curiosity about something? It could go on ad infinitum, depending on how curious we are.
Get it? Not simple. Just figuring out what we are really curious about can be challenging. Maybe that’s why life is so hard. Or, at least one reason.
So what do we pay attention to? Do we pay attention to what we are paying attention to? If we pay attention to what we are paying attention to, what will we notice about our curiosity? Is it constant? Or, does our curiosity change over the course of our lives?