Curiosity in a World That Makes No Sense

I love my phone. And the reason I love my phone is that because no matter where I am, if I have a question, I can find out the answer. Now, people love to dunk on technology, and they’re not wrong, but if I’m on a hike with my kids and we see a plant we don’t recognize, I can use an app and we can satisfy our curiosity right then and there. And I love it.

I think curiosity is the most ignored value that our society has. In fact, too many of us are incurious. We don’t want to seem ignorant, so we learn what we think we need to know and then we stop. But the problem is that we are ignorant and the world is such a beautifully interesting place. How could we not be interested in history, science, art, music or even just the people around us?

I love this curiosity. But even more than that, curiosity is sometimes our best tool when we’re coming up against someone whose way of looking at the world is so foreign that it feels repugnant to us. Sometimes I just can’t even understand how someone could be so wrong. And so, if I have any hope of building connection with them, I need to figure out how. I need to be curious and ask big questions.

Why do you think that? Why does that feel true to you? How do see that solution working? What problems seem important to you? Why those and not others? What about those counterarguments fails to resonate with you?

I’m not in this life to convince people to my way of seeing things. I don’t honestly think that’s possible. But I’m also not interested in pretending like I am the only moral being in the universe. Often my curiosity helps me see why I think what I think just as much as it helps me see another perspective. Often, it helps me discount entire realms of discussion. (Once I learned enough about anti-LGBT rights advocacy, I realized I wasn’t going to engage with arguments about the basic rights of any group of people anymore. That decision alone gave me back a lot of time.) Either way, curiosity is necessary to figure out how to overcome obstacles in advocacy and how to move forward in a way that recognizes the true scope of a problem.

If we could all stop ourselves when we think, “But that doesn’t make sense” and then force ourselves to ask, “How could that make sense?” problems might not become simpler, but they would move from the realm of the impossible to the realm of the complex. And while complex is hard, with enough thought, effort and resources, it can be overcome.