To Feel Like Yourself Again, Cultivate Curiosity
This part usually gets lost in the online discourse about reclaiming your brain.
Welcome or welcome back to Blog Therapy! Some of you are here thanks to a guest post I wrote for PORTUGAL DECODED, so I wanted to take this opportunity to say hi to you all.
If you enjoyed my advice column on how to thrive socially as an expat, you might also like this piece about linguistic habits and how they shape our interactions.
And if you’re here to dive down some godforsaken online curiosity hole, you’re in luck because today we’re doing a meta episode about cultivating curiosity.
When was the last time you learned something for fun? Not out of practical need, not for your work or school, definitely not for that side-hustle that should start popping off any day now. What about the last time your online experience was driven by intention and curiosity?
If anything, it increasingly feels like there’s an intellectual undercurrent pulling us in the opposite direction, whatever that is. Apathy? Intellectual fatigue? Passively absorbing information at random, as though through osmosis, at a pace dictated for us?
I know the Wall-E movie still is super on the nose, but it’s like we’ve collectively collapsed into our couches and handed over our brains in frustrated exhaustion to some algorithmic higher power, saying, here, you feed it.
I’m reading a few newsletters in parallel at the moment that are preoccupied with how to unfuck your brain if your attention span has turned into a trout you’re struggling to catch with your bare hands. On the off-chance that trying to sustain a train of thought for longer than 10 seconds feels like chasing globs of mercury across an ever-tilting floor.
And these authors have some brilliant advice: keep a journal or three, like Joan Didion; stop saying everything’s just not that deep (it usually is, and it’s worth digging into); read books for pleasure. Sometimes the subject matter intersects neurodiversity, mental health, and activism, which is incidentally where one of my favourite newsletters, Sluggish, lives. And so much the better, because that’s another space brimming with excellent advice on how to feed your brain in an informational food desert.
But today I want to go lower-level and look at the drive underpinning it all: curiosity.
As I see it, understanding the value of curiosity, cultivating it, and enjoying its presence in, and influence on, our lives is the key to all these other things. Without it, what are we even talking about when we say “unfuck your brain”? How are we supposed to, in good faith, cultivate intellectual curiosity without first understanding why that’s a desirable goal? I hope this essay can be a companion piece to the ones I mentioned above.
So let’s talk about curiosity: what is it? Why is it worth having? How do we cultivate it on purpose and how can we wield it to reclaim our inner lives?
Curiosity as appetite
That last line might sound dramatic, but I fully believe that, in the absence of curiosity, our inner lives get whittled down to whatever “culture” we’ve been consuming today, this week etc. That’s because curiosity—the motivated desire for information, experience, and novelty, more appetite than trait—is where personal interests are born. It’s what informs the way we interact with the world, whether we turn towards or away from it.
Curiosity interacts with all of our other drives, needs, impulses, and desires in a way that shapes us as fully-fledged people. Whether you like to try new foods or not, left your home town or married and settled down right after high school, what kinds of music, games, and movies you enjoy, how many languages you speak, your favourite way to spend the weekend—these are all, to some extent, a function of how much you lean into curiosity. Conversely, a lack of curiosity makes us cruel: faced with an unknown quantity, we’re more likely to lash out than inquire.
Theories at the intersection of psychology and philosophy consider it to be the driving force behind exploratory behaviour, which influences the preferences I just listed (for example, people higher in sensation-seeking traits are more likely to love spicy food).
I’ve always been on the more extreme end of that, though I suspect in my case the novelty-seeking might have something to do with ADHD. As a child, I saw my favourite cartoon characters scaling cliffs (anyone remember Johnny Quest?), so I decided to climb the tallest bookcase in my dad’s study. The destination Ulaanbaatar written on a shipping container at the Bangkok airport almost brought me to tears one jet-lagged morning years ago. As a kid, Mongolia had been a point of fascination that set my imagination on fire, the farthest place I could picture, and now I was practically in the neighbourhood.
There are, of course, downsides to extreme curiosity. My passion for urban exploration has led me into some very unstable abandoned buildings and I’m pretty sure befriending a pack of stray dogs in Georgia was a bad idea. (They accumulated as we went, so at one point we were walking around with eight big Caucasian shepherd mutts.)
But I think curiosity is also behind a lot of traits generally considered to be good and desirable, such as bravery, kindness, empathy, and, of course, creativity. It’s very hard to be kind towards a stranger without first getting curious about what it might be like for them. And creativity without curiosity is, uh, I’m drawing a blank. I guess I’ve never looked that far into the abyss; like, maybe, a belch in the wind? Insubstantial.
Curiosity has more in common with our appetites, our animal selves, than other intellectual qualities. It can be acquired and cultivated just like a taste for beer or spicy food and it can be stoked, piqued, even whetted like any other appetite. Just think of phrases like insatiable curiosity or hunger for knowledge—even our language reflects a tendency to connect the two.
Psychology places curiosity in the same box as “appetitive need-states” (e.g. hunger and thirst) and studies draw fascinating links between states on the boredom-curiosity continuum and ones existing between starving and sated. Just as physiological hunger moves us to get up and eat something, boredom pushes us to acquire new information. In fact, it’s likely the exploratory push of curiosity, combined with hunger, that made our ancestors venture in search of new foods.
One of my favourite theories suggests that our brains are wired to reward us richly whenever we follow our curiosity. When we seek out new information, dopamine is released from the mesolimbic pathway—a collection of neurons and a process associated with motivation, learning through trial and error, and how far we are willing to go for a reward. We’re like squirrels hoarding nuts when it comes to knowledge. Or at least, we’re meant to be.
One of the effects of a culture that prizes efficiency over process and constantly serves up bite-sized, digestible snippets of “information”, is we begin to neglect our innate curiosity. We might even underestimate its importance, now that we’re able to stimulate the same neural pathways, and obtain similar psychological results, with much less effort.
But neglecting our curiosity leads us to neglect ourselves, to become hollow inside in a way that leaves us stagnant, overwhelmed, suspended in thick, syrupy content sludge like a bug in amber.
Picture rows upon rows of abandoned houses in empty cul-de-sacs. The wind slams our darkened windows open and shut, leaves accumulate and mould in the corners, and somewhere in the background a speaker ominously blasts #reels viral music.
What’s in it for me?
Spooky stories aside, why should you bother to cultivate your curiosity?
Humans are born curious and, somewhere between first grade and high school, we learn to keep that to ourselves. There are no stupid questions in this classroom, but stop asking stupid questions. Unfortunately, the way we’ve set up the systems meant to encourage and expand young people’s intellectual curiosity work hard to nip it in the bud.
Early socialisation is full of pithy advice such as it’s nosy to ask why, and mind your own business. Likewise, work is a more peaceful place if you don’t get too curious about things outside the scope of your role. Curiosity killed the cat and all that. It’s easy, then, to see why it can feel counterintuitive, even dangerous, to welcome curiosity. What are you trying to do, get me in trouble?
But it’s my view that curiosity is the spice of life. Variety is fine and good, but one leads to the other—you need curiosity, a drive for exploration, in order to understand, seek out, and relish a smorgasbord of experiences.
So if you’re asking why you should cultivate curiosity, it’s so you can experience more of this life, more fully; to have a rich inner life, too, populated by the people, places, memories, tastes, smells, the snippets of culture and information you chose, rather than ones chosen for you by the algorithm; to be truly interesting to partners and friends, and to yourself, instead of merely performing interesting.
If you want to be a better friend, who can listen and empathise deeply, cultivate curiosity. If you want to be the kind of person who turns toward new experiences instead of away from them, cultivate curiosity. If you want to be present IRL, stop doomscrolling, connect with other human beings, feel smarter, feel more satisfied with how you spent your day—see above. I mean it. There’s no way of breaking the loop of passive content consumption, loneliness, isolation, division, cruelty, rinse and repeat, that doesn’t involve curiosity.
Wikipedia curiosity holes
This is something I like to do on lazy, overcast Saturday mornings, when I’d otherwise have my coffee with a side of scrolling through Instagram until I feel vaguely dead inside. Like I need to cough up a slimy ball of half-digested leaves that also happens to be my soul. And then my Saturday is all fucked.
So, instead, I dive down a Wikipedia curiosity hole. It usually starts with a question left over from last night’s conversation, a debate easily settled but that somehow got skated over, a curiosity only half-satisfied as we galloped through topics, with my partner or with friends, over a bowl of chilli or a glass of wine. The etymology of merit, a history date we probably memorised in high school and have since forgotten, a remote point somewhere in Central Asia we swear we’d one day love to see. Any loose thread is a good place to start.
I look up a cursory explanation on Wikipedia and read until I’ve had my fill (sometimes I want something more in-depth, so I’ll check out the references too), then follow the next link that piques my curiosity. Picture a monkey hopping from vine to vine. It’s like that, but from one obscure link to another. It could be a word I don’t know, the name of a historical figure somehow involved in the first query or even a paper or article cited at the bottom of the page. Here, I do the same, until I spot a new link I want to know more about, and so on until it’s time to get out of bed and walk the dog.
The curiosity hole is usually seven to eight links deep and in the process I might go from learning about dopamine to Huntington’s disease (which, admittedly, isn’t too big of a leap). But if you want to start somewhere more far-out, there are lists of obscure Wikipedia pages and even Wikiroulette. Of course, the point of a curiosity hole is self-directed exploration, so these are only useful at providing start points. The rest is up to you, boo.
How is it different from a run-of-the-mill rabbit hole?
Before anyone comments that I’ve just invented rabbit holes: I’m not trying to. They’re two very different kinds of getting lost.
A rabbit hole is accidental, linear, characterised by chance and distraction. You fall down a rabbit hole and lose track of time as a way to procrastinate or as a result of being distracted in the first place. Or maybe you get sucked into a rabbit hole to subconsciously avoid an icky feeling or situation. In any case, it happens without your intention and there’s only one direction of travel: down.
Curiosity holes, on the other hand, are intentional, branching or squiggly, and driven by—as the name suggests—curiosity. It’s a meandering activity, yes, but it has a goal. It’s like getting lost on purpose while vacationing in a new city. It’s true that you don’t know where you’re going, but the destination was never the point.
Instead, you were driven by the desire to get to know more about the place you’re in and ended up trying to see what’s around this corner, and that one, and down this narrow street and so on. And now you’re only kind of lost and you’ve gone on an adventure. It feels satisfying in a way rabbit holes, with their characteristic distraction, rarely do.
In a way, curiosity holes and their long-eared counterpart are opposites: you embark on the former of your own accord and with intention, while the latter happens to you. In fact, social media algorithms are uniquely good at sending users down a rabbit hole: with each successive video or reel you move through the content pipeline, but it’s a guided tour you didn’t sign up for. Make a habit of it and you’ll start feeling progressively less like yourself, emptier, and more overwhelmed.
I think we’ve all heard enough “phones are bad, m’kay” discourse to last us a couple of lifetimes. This isn’t that. I think social media can be a powerful tool for activism and a great way to be aware of what’s going on in your bubble, and beyond it.
What I’m concerned with here is the kind of content hyper-consumption that leaves us unable to think for ourselves; that takes away our ability to meaningfully engage with the world; that ultimately leaves us worse off, lonelier, hollow, bereft of rich inner lives of our own.