‘What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.’ – Morpheus, The Matrix.
Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, as an example, was a paragon of curiosity. He was renowned (notoriously) for walking tirelessly around the Athenian square, interrogating annoyed passersby on such simple-to-answer questions as ‘what is truth?’ and ‘what is justice?’. Indeed, Socrates often would test both himself and others through relentless questioning until a position either crystallised or crumbled: it is oft-quoted that Socrates proclaimed an ‘unexamined life’ to be ‘not worth living’.
I’m not advocating for people to accost strangers with these sorts of questions. However, there is something to be said for the idea that curiosity enriches lives and characters. On the one hand, curiosity exposes you to a wide range of possibilities, to things and people you may never realise you are interested in unless you actively practice curiosity. On the other, curiosity about beliefs helps to sharpen them: beliefs, in my opinion, are only worth having and defending if they can be held up to concerted close scrutiny and survive.
Indeed, a lack of curiosity can often be equated with cowardice. If you don’t want to hold your firm beliefs up to scrutiny, it can indicate a latent fear that these beliefs aren’t so firm: equally, the refusal to explore other possibilities in life might stem from an insecurity or latent awareness that the path you have chosen is unfulfilling.
It is worth thinking about when you last truly stepped back and evaluated your life. Or even when you last actively set out to learn something new. It is deeply concerning, as Maria Popova references in her Marginalian article (a great site and worth exploring), that curiosity has been construed by thinkers, even those as prominent as Aristotle, as a ‘witless tendency to pry into things that didn’t concern us’.
Watching The Matrix as a 14-year-old – and having now watched it five times since – opened my conscious mind to the benefits of curiosity. The blue pill and red pill analogy from The Matrix (although it has been very problematically repurposed) holds firm to the value of curiosity in everyday life: we are unconsciously faced with the choice to not question our world and float through life (blue pill) or to harness curiosity to learn about the world and ourselves in a meaningful way (red).
Floating through life creates a sense of restless ennui: it is the ‘splinter in your mind’ that nags at you and subtly, when you look for it, tells you something is not right in your life or the world. When you free your mind by practising curiosity, challenge yourself to open up to other perspectives and abandon preconception, that is where true growth occurs.
We are everyday given a choice to accept our world as it is or to question things and pave an independent path. This doesn’t have to mean you ask massive questions like Socrates asking Athenian passersby ‘what is Justice?’. Seemingly smaller questions can change the world: AirBnB’s founders asking why no system enabling homes to be rented existed, Uber’s founders asking why you couldn’t summon a ride from the tap of a phone, or Australia’s own Melanie Perkins of Canva asking why no tool existed to make design easy for everyone. All were curious, and acted on their curiosity to create world-changing companies that enacted real social benefit.
Curiosity may kill the cat, but it creates thinkers, movers, and shakers. Interesting people are curious people. If nothing else, if you don’t want to be boring and don’t want to be bored, be curious.
Tom Carne 