Re: how do you manage your curiosity?
The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. I am sharing it with permission from my correspondent, without disclosing their identity. My point is how to make best use of one’s curiosity.
Now, I would like to ask how you manage your curiosity.
I have questions about almost every subject I encounter, which I don’t necessarily need to answer at that time, and tend to immediately search for answers.
For example, I was once curious about system calls, so I grabbed an OS book and read about them. I could’ve just stopped here, but then I was curious about how they actually work in Linux; I wasn’t satisfied by just knowing the theoretical aspects of it. Eventually, I was able to find out how they work at the assembly level. Although it was fun, this deep knowledge wasn’t actually needed for my project.
This also happens to non-CS fields like pure mathematics or science, which for me is impossible to gain deep knowledge right away.
In summary, this tendency to go down rabbit holes does more harm than good, especially when I have tasks I’d planned to do during the day.
So recently, I’ve been trying to steer myself towards focusing on the projects I chose, to achieve my goals in the long term. When I have a question, I first ask myself whether it’s relevant to my current projects, and whether it’s okay to seek answers right at that time.
However, it’s often painful to do so, and it almost feels like a punishment for my curiosity. I blame myself whenever I try to satisfy my curiosity instead of doing the task. I’m afraid I’ll gradually kill my curious mind if this continues.
I’d love to hear your opinions on this as well as your experience.
Curiosity has immense potential. Though it cannot realise it without a structure around it. Generally, talent reaches its finest expression once it is placed in the right framework. Otherwise, it gets wasted or falls short of what it could have been.
There has to be a goal for the curious mind. Something greater than curiosity for the sake of curiosity, which provides immediate guidance on whether a given path is worth exploring or not.
The goal is like the lodestar. It is a fixed position in the night sky. You know whether you are moving towards it or are deviating from it.
The curious mind is akin to the seafarer. Imagine the sailors who hop on a ship to explore some uncharted waters. Nobody knows what they will find there. Maybe there is some exotic island, filled with nice fruit, which has the conditions for a decent collective life. Or maybe there are untold horrors there that nobody is prepared to deal with.
Those explorers are extra useful to their people when they eventually make a clearing for some settlement. They will build a port and some houses, which will gradually grow to become a community. What they discover thus becomes available to those who are not as exploratory in nature. The community is the resulting common good which others partake in.
The curious mind is the mind of the pioneer. Though those who venture first into the unknown also are the ones who take on the greatest risk. They are the most likely to suffer whatever pain awaits them. Curiosity can be disempowering and will then feel like a curse. This happens when the goal is not clear or, as is usually the case, when the goal is something the person is not passionate about.
Goals can feel empty when they are not embedded in the conscience as important. In other words, they are not connected to something greater still. For example, a student might not understand why it is useful to study because they have not connected the fruits of studying to some concrete lifelong benefit. Having sight of the immediate target of the study is not enough: it has to be contextualised in something that gives it meaning.
This brings me to the point of purpose. You may find yourself getting distracted away from your immediate projects. At first, this seems like an undesirable outcome. Though consider the possibility that your body is effectively asking “why am I even doing this?”. It is wondering where the lodestar is.
When you go down a rabbit hole, which appears to be pointless, you can interpret it as a self-harming indulgence, which it might well be, or you can try to understand whether there is something deeper in you, something sincere that is being suppressed, which seeks clarity about your purpose.
Some people have a direct path to their purpose. The curious mind does not. It explores all the time in what effectively is its way of understanding itself through its relationship with the world. Think of the curious mind like the bat which sees itself in a space formed by echoes.
It is possible to kill curiosity. Sometimes people die inside and are forever broken, never to find their zest again and make any meaningful contribution that fulfils them. Though I do not expect this to happen merely by directing your curiosity. It will have to be something more injurious.
Now, what does “directing your curiosity” mean in practice? At first, it means that you have to accept that you may not yet have the experience to know who you are because you have not figured out where you are. To reuse the bat metaphor, you need to generate more echo, which you do by letting your curiosity lead you where it must.
In the second phase though, you have enough experience to know more about yourself. You can tell with confidence what your strengths are and how you may harness them. You will have at least an inkling of what it is you want and which is the figurative haven you will stay at. You thus learn to channel your curiosity like a laser beam. It is so concentrated that it is supremely effective in its results.
This is where I come in. I too have a curious mind. This has a purely intellectual dimension, expressed as inquisitiveness to figuratively clear the path towards a more complete understanding of a given subject. Though it also has a physical expression in how I literally cleared the land where I built my house, for example.
When I was a student at school, I did not understand why studying was important, so I did not study. I always had the mind I have now, but I was not directing it in ways that were intellectually inclined. I was not doing anything noteworthy on that front. Indeed, I was surprised with myself when I started to realise that I could be a thinker. I was reading some book and my thoughts were racing in all directions, trying to compute the implications of what I was learning and then to connect my findings to other thoughts in what was a network of sequences that all made sense. It was an explosion of coherent ideas, even if their initial expression was not as refined.
There was a point where I was reading too much about everything I could get my hands on. Eventually, I realised that I could not move in all directions. Over time, the immediate goal I had, which was to keep the job I got in the field I studied (European Union politics), proved to be something I was not passionate about. That was a moment of crisis.
The word “crisis” has the meaning of a difficult situation. Though it also means “judgement”. It is, in other words, an opportunity, however painful, to critically assess the situation and move forward from a position of knowledge. I realised that my calling was not to be met in the world of day-to-day politics. I moved permanently to the countryside I had lived in before. I have stayed here ever since and have become a philosopher in the process. Being a philosopher is something that could not be anticipated by my trajectory as a teenager: I was not intellectually inclined at all and was merely interested in football (soccer).
My curiosity became a sharp tool. I directed it at Linux, for example, and learnt enough to be highly productive on the computer, despite the fact that I only got my first laptop in my ~mid-twenties. I learnt Git and the command-line well beyond what was absolutely essential for my everyday tasks. I then shifted my focus to Emacs and understood it reasonably well, to the point where I even taught myself how to program in Lisp, despite not having any formal training in this or neighbouring fields. Same idea of all the other activities that form part of my life: the house I now have, dogs, agriculture…
I let my curiosity take me far enough. Though I have a sense of what is “too far”; a sense that I got through experience. “Experience” basically means trial and error. You will have to feel some pain to know when to stop. The body is an excellent mechanism in this regard. It is why you want to put ideas to the test. Do not keep them in your head. Try things out, give them a material expression, which will then allow your body to give you the fine feedback it is capable of. If we are talking about computer science, write some application, do some reverse engineering, explore some algorithm. In general, put your thoughts to the test.
Overthinking is how you waste the potential of the body. You let the brain test everything without realising that the thought experiment is not the right tool for reporting feedback at a deep level. You want to be “out there”, living your ideas. This is how the curious mind best understands itself, acquires the experience it needs, and is then equipped with the skill of channelling its immense power wherever it wants.
My curious mind remains curious about everything. Though it is embodied in a body that has recognised its limits. Concretely, I know not to go down rabbit holes whose end result I cannot justify. For example, what will I actually do if I learn about the inner workings of the Linux kernel? Yes, I do have the intellectual curiosity to seek an answer to that question, though I know that in practice any answer is not enough, in isolation, to make me a kernel developer or, generally, to give me some concrete long-term value.
There are so many topics I would like to learn more about. But because I have developed the attitude of living my ideas, of embedding them in everyday conduct, I can anticipate how many otherwise interesting topics are not viable for me. This makes them not interesting in practice, although they are interesting in theory.
This is the key then. Continue to experiment and to explore. There will be ups and downs. You will feel lost at times and wonder whether there is any meaning to what you are doing. Learn to gradually integrate your findings into your corpus of knowledge. You do this by putting ideas to practice.
When something happens in practice, it creates consequences; consequences you normally have to live with. Where there are enough of these consequences, they effectively form a framework around your actions: you cannot do whatever you want because the scope of your choices has been narrowed by your prior decisions.
For example, if I have 4 hours of free time in the day, I can indulge my curiosity or commit to something I already have put a lot of effort into, such as to write an essay for my website, deal with my correspondence which I greatly enjoy, maintain my Emacs packages, work my land, play with my dogs…
Which brings forth the issue of caring that I hinted at earlier when I mentioned how one is passionate about something. For example, I love my dogs, so spending quality time with them is not a generic entry on my wishlist, but a major part of my life that I want to safeguard and continuously nurture. Same idea for my other projects. The website, for example, has been going since 2011 and I publish long-form, hand-written text continuously: I do it because I love it. And “I love it” is something that grew over time, as I kept trying until I realised that it was something I wanted to live with long-term.
Learn, then, to trust your feelings. Do not just do what reason dictates or society expects. For example, do not say “I should be making money, but instead here I am reading about THING”. Of course, money is useful up to a point, but if you are doing it without any kind of love, then you will burn out. By trusting your feelings more, you will discover what reverberates in you and you will then be more likely to recognise it, to commit to it, to understand it in depth, and to become who you are capable of being.
Remember that the many commitments naturally contain your curiosity, which is how they may then make you more picky and adept at using your curiosity in a laser-like kind of way.