CURIOSITY- THE TRAIT THAT MAKES LIFE MORE INTERESTING

Mar 6
4 min read

There is a certain kind of person who can't walk past a bookshelf without scanning the spines. Who always has to know what's around the next corner. Who has lived in multiple cities, visited more countries than they can easily count, and somehow still doesn't feel like they've seen enough. If that sounds familiar, you already know what curiosity looks like — because you've been living it.

Curiosity doesn't announce itself as a virtue when you're young. It shows up as restlessness; a low hum of "but what about this?" that follows you through childhood like a shadow. For me, it meant staying up well past bedtime, reading under the covers with a flashlight, unwilling to stop mid-chapter just because the lights were supposed to be out. It meant deciding, in first grade, that I wanted to write in cursive before anyone had taught me, insisting on turning in all my assignments in a written cursive I had proudly designed myself, until my teachers eventually had to cave in and gave my mother the third-grade cursive workbook, just to make sure I learned it correctly.

I grew up in a small town that was snowed in half the year. There wasn't much to do or see. But there were books. And eventually, I was introduced to National Geographic magazines, with their iconic yellow borders and photographs of places so vivid and foreign they didn't seem real. I read every issue cover to cover, fascinated by the landscapes I had never stood in, imagining people whose lives were nothing like mine. Curiosity, I learned early, is the best escape route available to a kid who can't yet go anywhere.

The interesting thing about that kind of inner life is that it doesn't stay inner forever. The imagination that gets you through childhood becomes the engine that drives you as an adult. By college, I had accumulated three wildly unrelated degrees; because I genuinely couldn't stop finding things interesting. I wanted to learn and do it all. That's still true. It's probably why I couldn’t wait to escape my home town, and finally ended up in Los Angeles, a city full of dreamers and nonconformists who've quietly decided that a conventional life was never really the point. Then launched on to obsessively traveling the world.

And now, the world has become something the kid reading under the covers could never have imagined. Curiosity used to require patience, you had to wait for the library to open, for the documentary to air, for the next issue to arrive in the mail. Now you can take a virtual tour of the Guggenheim on a Tuesday afternoon. You can see the view from the summit of Everest without leaving your kitchen. There is no limit to what you can learn today- no waiting. Artificial intelligence poses the possibility that if something can be imagined, it can actually become real. The tools available to a curious mind today are without limit in ways that feel genuinely new in human history. Whatever your version of those National Geographic magazines was - whatever first made you lean forward and say "I want to know more about that", well, the world is now built to answer you.

But curiosity is still needed - to ask the questions, to form the ideas. It's so easy today to just sit back and take it all in, from the comfort of your couch. It's the dreamers and doers that move society forward. The questions still have to come from someone. The world can answer anything now - but only if you're still curious enough to ask.

That said, curiosity isn't always comfortable to live with. It can make routine feel like a mild form of suffocation. It can make you restless in situations where other people seem perfectly content. It can cause friction with relationships, steady employment, and with being the person others can count on for regular commitments and solid plans. Sometimes I genuinely wish I could be satisfied staying in one place, keeping a steady schedule, not feeling that low-level hum of "what else is out there." The grass-is-greener feeling is, in some ways, the tax you pay for being this way.

So here's what I've come to understand: the restlessness and the richness are the same thing. The same trait that made sitting still in a snowed-in town feel impossible is what eventually made the world feel navigable and full of possibility. You don't get one without the other. I am more at peace taking off on a plane than I am staying at home. The longer I stay with something, the more I feel the pull toward whatever's next. I've learned to lean into it — swinging between intellectual deep-dives and creative pursuits, each one feeding the other in ways I couldn't have planned. And that's just something I've learned to accept as a part of being me.

So if you recognize yourself in any of this — if you've always been the person who reads ahead, who has no plan, who books the trip or changes the career or picks up the hobby that makes no practical sense - this isn't a problem to fix. It's just who you are. And more often than not, it turns out to be exactly enough. Make your peace with it, because it is much easier to stop trying to be someone you aren’t meant to be than to just be your authentic self.

Life has no roadmap- if your course is full of twists and turns and some dead ends, it just means you are living a life filled with curiosity. And that is a life well-lived.