Re: fear, clinginess, curiosity, and injurious experiences

2026-09-09

The following is an excerpt from a private exchange. It builds on what I published before: Re: how do you manage your curiosity? (2026-09-05).

It can stand on its own, which is why I am publishing it separately. Again, I am doing it without disclosing the identity of my correspondent.

The quotes that are two levels deep are mine from my previous publication. The others belong to my correspondent.

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You seem to have a very stable set of commitments. I wonder if trial-and-error was also involved here. For me, there were things I wanted to keep working on in the long term, but I always had to pause due to environmental constraints and external events. Did you have similar experiences?

Overall, my biggest fear with controlling my curiosity has been losing myself, but hearing your experiences gave me enough confidence that this is unlikely to be the case.

“Fear” is the key here. Keep this in mind for my other comments as well. It is related to every aspect of this topic.

First to your question. Yes, trial and error was involved. I was not always the person I am today. My growth has been surprising in this regard. I can compare my teenage self to my present self to give you a concrete idea.

As a teenager, I had no intellectual interests whatsoever. I was not reading books, I was not studying for school, I did not have any plan for my future such as to become a scientist or an engineer or whatnot. When they were doing career orientation day I was leaving school to go have fun.

I was good at sport in general and especially good at football (soccer). I took it very seriously and was a pillar of discipline about it, meaning that I would always be on time, do all the drills correctly, never fake it, train no matter the circumstances, never find excuses not to put in the hard work.

As a sportsman, I had tenacity of body because, fundamentally, I had tenacity of mind. But I was not an intellectual in any way. I was a dumb boy. You would never think of starting a conversation such as this one with me, for example. Or any kind of “deep” discussion for that matter. I would only do silly things and talk nonsense the whole time, while making fun of everything.

I did not respect most of my teachers at school. I talked back to them and ridiculed what to me looked like their absurdity. In short, I was not a “good boy” in the way most people understand this term. I was only good when it concerned what I cared about, namely, football. I was never a bully and would hurt bullies in my midst because that is the only language they understand. I was not a delinquent child. I simply was not one to be controlled and because of my discipline, which I would demonstrate in sport but which I generally had as a form of responsibility, I was earning my independence from a very young age.

Because of an untimely injury that prevented me from becoming a professional footballer, I turned my attention to studying. Even though I was not a good student at first and had no interest in all that “incredibly boring stuff”, I discovered that I actually enjoyed thinking things in depth. I was fascinated by the process of discovery. In short, I realised that I could become a thinker. What you see now is the result of that transformation.

But becoming a thinker was not a straightforward process. I had no idea what I actually wanted to do. The formal study I picked was about the European Union (the European integration process). I did not know anything about this field and the only thing that drew me to it was that I could use foreign languages (my native tongue is Greek). Yes, I was superficial in this regard—I was a dumb boy, after all.

I formally learnt about political science, economics, and law. Then I started my blog/website where I wrote articles on the political topics of that time that were of interest to me. A Member of the European Parliament from Portugal found my blog and offered me a job. So I ended up in Brussels, working at a centre of power, before even getting my Bachelor’s degree, without ever being involved in party politics, and without any connections to people of authority.

There I realised that I did not actually like politics. The theoretical aspects are appealing, but the day-to-day stuff is not interesting to me. In the meantime, I was always observant of phenomena, and would show a knack for discerning in them that which was common in their multitude. In other words, I was becoming a philosopher without realising it in the beginning.

This trial and error made me move away from Brussels to the mountains of Cyprus, where I now am. I have a house here, that I designed from scratch and built myself. I am no longer who I was when I was at the heart of the European Union. My preferences have changed, my ideas have become more clear, I have become more efficient in my methods and decisive in my actions. That I write in one go, that I do it frequently, and that my writings have the coherence they do is evidence of this.

Through these words you can find this person because there is no faking these words. I am this. To put it metaphorically, I have an extremely sharp cutting edge which was blunt in the beginning and became what it is now by continuously hitting it against all sorts of surfaces.

You can already tell from this that my path to where I have arrived was not a straight line. It went left and right, up and down, always open to the possibility of the new that I sensed but could not name. It took me from the most modest of jobs, such as construction work and bartending, to the centres of political control, and then to the countryside where I live at the margins of Cypriot society as something akin to a more polite dog.

People romanticise the man who moves away from established society. They do it to me as well. Not because they actually want to live the frugal life. No! They prefer their comforts even when they claim otherwise. They do it because deep down they know that the only way to find yourself is by losing yourself. But fear keeps them at the level of romanticising instead of acting out of that ideal, at the level of fantasising oneself as another instead of becoming another.

You can now understand “fear” better. It is the clinginess people have towards the thing they think they own. We are not prepared to let go. We hold on to whatever we think is ours and we carry it as far as we can. This is how Sisyphus, the man who rolls a boulder up the mountain, punishes himself. He is representing clinginess: to hold on to everything and to carry it with you. This “everything” includes the self you are, where you are not prepared to forgo this self so that you might become another. The “might become” is how Sisyphus drops the boulder and can now move up to the top of the mountain unburdened. There at the top he sees open vistas, new horizons, an entire world of possibilities. He is no longer the man who is punishing a boulder uphill for an eternity. He left his clinginess roll downhill.

You find yourself by losing yourself. What does this mean? It means that you proceed through trial and error. You trust in your heart that the inkling you have about what you are searching for might actually be what you will fall in love with. This is not a rational plan. Those who think they can sort out everything through a thought experiment or some neat program are simply letting their fear do the talking. What I represent is the person who jumps off a cliff, with nothing but faith, with nothing other than the inkling that there is something there to be loved, and who grows wings on the way down.

For as long as you are thinking about it without doing anything, which means that you may be overthinking it, you are operating within the boundaries that your innermost fear has delineated. The fear has drawn your comfort zone. It is even encouraging you to continue overthinking: “figure everything out completely” it says, “before you make a move”. What it does not add is “because I do not want to leave this place”. The fear knows that you will never figure out everything, so you will stay exactly where you are, which is what it wants.

Notice that in the above paragraph I am personifying the fear as somebody else who is not you and who is keeping you there. You can think of it as another spirit, as a daemon as we say in Greek, which has a life of its own (“daemon” does not mean evil; it is a spirit with a life of its own, and thus with preferences). This is a rhetorical device, a metaphor to say in one word what requires an entire essay to describe. I am referring to the clinginess we have, where we think that what we hold on to is super valuable, when it seldom is.

Now consider all of the above in light of what you wrote about “controlling my curiosity”. This is your fear talking even if it does not feel like an intense emotion. It says “stay here, do not go anywhere”. It will show you all sorts of monsters to compel you into inaction. It will speak about horrors and the terrible fate that awaits you if you dare to move away from where you are. For as long as you do what it is telling you, you are in effect befriending your fear. The daemon has taken over you and you are now its toy. You are staying there.

Trust in your feelings. I speak of “feelings”, not reason, because there is no reasonable explanation why I jump off cliffs. I do it because fear is not my friend. I am the daemon to the daemons. I do everything I want because fear does not talk to me. I live where I do, outside a built-up area, because even fear is afraid of the dragon I have become.

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.

What if the path seems unrelated to the goal on the surface, but can actually give new insights?

Then you will surprise yourself, which is consistent with what I wrote above. You will discover something you had not anticipated, something that was not part of your dreams, something that did not live within the boundaries of your comfort zone. What remains to be determined, then, is whether you will follow it or not.

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.

Could you give your definitions of the related terms, such as “goals”, “commitments”, “projects”, and so on? That would help me a lot.

I learned the hard way that I cannot just fake my goals! They need to be sincere. When I tried faking them, I eventually asked “why” and then collapsed.

I can give you any definition you want. I am interested in rigour. You know there is rigour in my deeds, there is coherence in my thinking, there is consistency throughout, no matter what I do.

Though you are smart and already experienced enough to understand that what I wrote above about fear fundamentally speaks to our desire for clarity and closure. We want things to be closed because what we fear the most is openendedness. The open vistas are scary, the stories without a finale leave us unsettled, whereas our cosy little bedroom with its clear boundaries is so nice.

What I write is defined by fearlessness. You know it has structure. You know it is as defined as chiselled marble. You also know it is uncompromising and will go wherever it wants because it is free of fear.

So I can give you definitions, which you can cross-reference with dictionaries or all the books of the world, but you will eventually learn that “definitions” is not what you need, even if it is what you now want.

What the curious mind needs, and may develop gradually through trial and error, is to learn the art of thriving in indeterminacy. It is the mastery of living in a world that has no closure.

Here are some definitions, to answer your question, but I repeat that those are a distraction from what you really need.

• Goal: The end state of a process (e.g. I will write to Protesilaos).
• Commitment: Activity that requires upkeep (e.g. watering the plants, else they die).
• Project: An analysis (“breaking down”) of a goal that enumerates the prerequisites and thus the intermediate goals (e.g. to build a house, I have to build the foundation, the foundation unlocks the setting up of the walls, which then unlocks the installation of electricity, etc.—to write to Protesilaos, I have to have an idea of what to discuss, I have to have the tool to make the communication happen, and so on).

Not faking your goals is how you learn to trust your heart. Take that to where it leads you and you will discover that you too can jump off of cliffs, with faith as your sole motive, like I have been doing.

I’d always identified myself as a software developer, but I’ve been thinking that this might not be my only calling.

Ever since I started to learn computer science, I’ve been feeling the strong desire for rigorous and formalized theory. I found informal explanations in introductory books were not satisfying enough. This led me to study formal logic at some point, which I think was one of the most fascinating experiences in my life.

I do still love building things I want, but this desire for rigor is not going away. I can feel it whenever I’m studying some theory required to build something.

It is useful to be rigorous. It is also intellectually rewarding. You can think of it more as “fun” though rather than an absolute necessity for everything. Because if you make it a requirement for everything then you will be miserable as you will always be seeking closure and you will always be feeling unease while you are dealing with indeterminacy or uncertainty.

Software developer or not describes the kind of activity that is interesting to you, but is not who you are. Remember that you can be the person who lets the boulder roll down the mountain, while you move on to the summit to get a completely different view of the world. Today you are a software developer, tomorrow you can be something else. There will be elements of the past that continue to live through into your future, though they take on other forms.

People suffer because they identify with their job and with their ideas to the point where they cannot move on when the time calls for a change. Again, this is clinginess. The job/activity is helpful for as long as you are feeling alright with it. It becomes burdensome once your heart no longer has passion for it. This may happen for all sorts of reasons, including external factors. But the fact is that you will be harming yourself while forcing yourself to do that which you no longer love.

I keep mentioning emotions and love because I want to emphasise that you cannot fully rationalise the world. You will never be able to describe the beauty of a sunset through some formula. That is a reductive exercise and “reduction” is the correct concept because it takes something away from the whole.

You will never capture in words how a kiss feels. Those who always try never experience a kiss even while being kissed. You know deep down this is the case, so the sooner you embrace the multifacetedness of the human condition, the reason and the emotion, the bodily pleasure and the aesthetic delight, all as one, you will be prepared to navigate indeterminacy.

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.

What would “something more injurious” be like?

Some really harmful experience like betrayal or abuse. Though it can happen more slowly too as slow erosion and eventual collapse of an environment. For example, you love a certain job and you go work in a certain place where you discover that over time it has become a toxic milieu. This is the death by a thousand cuts that people never take seriously because they only think of death by a single blow.

There, because of that toxicity, you become stressed and jaded. Your defences are always up and you lose trust in everything, including your very ability to cope with the challenges. Your horizons start shrinking because there is nothing around you to look towards with a sense of admiration and awe. Nothing is beautiful anymore. Nothing is attractive. As the horizons shrink, they converge into a tiny dot, with darkness all around. There you only find depression, which is how you as the person who reached that point dies; it dies while still leaving behind a body that lives as an empty shell hoping to be animated again, to have a soul breathed into it once more.

Consider this metaphor of the shrinking horizons in terms of thinking things in depth. If you go too deep, in a literal sense, you only find darkness and the kind of air that poisons your lungs. There may be riches along the way, such as valuable minerals, but you are moving towards a world that is not your world and will be hostile towards you.

This is why the wisest of Greeks speak in metaphor and why people who do not understand that surface and depth are one only think literally. We call these phenomena “Hades”, the god of the underworld, the god of the dead, the god of wealth. In the depths you find riches and you also find death. The riches are literally the minerals but figuratively they are the profundity of thought, that deep knowledge the curious mind seeks.

The “underworld” is a place that is very close to us while being decisively alien. We move towards Hades whenever we go in depth and reach a point where all we see is that tiny dot. In seeing that dot, we have become the person who can only see a dot. We have been transformed into that being. But that being no longer belongs to the world of the sun. It is forever destined to stay with Hades: he will not let anybody leave. Hence death.

So the injurious experience that involves depression will kill the person. This means that what you were doing is no longer viable. There may exist a new soul that can be breathed into your body. This can happen as you move towards a different direction where you might discover something else that you are passionate for. This is again the metaphor of transanimation, of your soul dying so that there is a new soul to take its stead.

I have experienced this death and this transanimation. It is part of the trials and errors I have been through. And because I was dead, and because I was reborn, I am not afraid of anything anymore.

Also, I’m being more and more skeptical about being a software developer. The industry in MY COUNTRY [edited for privacy] appears to be mostly talking about running businesses, building agents with LLMs to ship products more efficiently. I don’t want to play that game, however entertaining these can be.

I understand and feel you. It seems so shallow. Though you realise that people will be shallow most of the time, no matter what you do.

I can tell you from my self that the curious mind, the mind that tends to go far and deep, typically is lonely. It is very unlikely that you meet another person who is on the same wavelength as you. You might have a thousand friends, covering a broad range of activities, and you will still be lonely in this regard.

“Lonely” means that you cannot share the depths of how you feel with others because they simply cannot understand you. They are not there where you can go so they have no frame of reference. Imagine you are a fish and wish to invite your human friends to the depths of the ocean: they will never be with you because such is their nature and such is your nature as well.

To reuse the metaphor I brought up earlier, in my case people meet an ordinary man. I am talkative. I am amiable. I am fun. I can do stuff with them and help them out. What they cannot fathom in the face of all this, because the depth is obscure, is that I actually am a dragon.

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.

I read this as getting myself into a feedback loop; I have an idea, test it out, gain feedback, and repeat this process. I guess I need some practice here. I tend to overthink without actually doing anything.

I’m also curious about how this would look like in philosophy.

Exactly! You want the feedback loop. You want it to involve your body. You want it to have consequences “out there”. Those are conditions that somehow shape your decisions. The “out there” reality of your ideas helps you have a three-dimensional understanding of what they are and what they can produce.

The philosopher is prone to overthinking and thus to suffering. All of what I wrote above can be presented as my philosophy of living, which is that deeds form you, that your choices become your destiny. This is a long way of saying “you cannot just be a friend of wisdom (literally what philosopher means) but you must become an agent of wisdom”. Stop thinking. Start acting.