Curiouser

A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with my friend James and he said, “You’re someone who’s so curious about so many things — why aren’t you curious about this?”

It’s become a question I’ve started asking myself almost once a day. Why aren’t you curious about this?

Like many of us, I do a lot of what my friend Alan Jacobs in Breaking Bread with the Dead calls “informational triage” — constantly trying to separate and sort out what the heck I should be paying attention to.

So I shut out a lot. But I also have to be open — what if the things I’m not interested in turn out to be interesting?

I mentioned this dilemma to Kevin Kelly (we were talking about AI), and he quoted one of the pieces of advice in Excellent Advice for Living: “For a great payoff / be especially curious / about the things you are not interested in.”

This is particularly true if you want to be a curious elder.

It reminded me of the perfect title of Nina Katchadourian’s great show that I saw five years ago: Curiouser. Nina spoke about how she liked the idea of “curiouser” as a noun, a job title, something you could be.