A funny thing about curiosity

Being curious is important to me. Not only because it is how I get ideas for essays. It feels to me like everyone has something unrepeatable to bring into the world. And we can manifest it by going in our direction of maximal interestingness.

the path of maximal interestingness is supposed to feel like fun . Not fun as in “I feel entertained” but fun as in, “this is engrossing and self-surprising, life-affirming and a little scary.”

The more general point, then, is: interestingness, the compulsion to know, is not a property of an idea; it is a cluster of emotions. You can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly. You have to look for that thing that surges up in you—surges like rage, like laughter, like sadness—when you encounter clues.

Here’s a funny thing: when I ask myself, “What is the most amusing thing I could do next?” the ideas that occur to me feel . . . interesting. A lot more interesting than the ideas I get when looking for the interesting.

Being curious is important to me. Not only because it is how I get ideas for essays. It feels to me like everyone has something unrepeatable to bring into the world. And we can manifest it by going in our direction of maximal interestingness. The pattern we make as our curiosity pulls us hither and thither like a dog chasing a smell across a field—... See more

I notice that I feel embarrassed by the ideas I get when I ask myself what would be funny to write about. The ideas feel odd (a review of underrated grammatical tense forms, an essay exploring the image of transparent ice) and I can’t explain why they excite me. They feel elliptical and, well, not like the kind of thing I should be writing.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong in making things that are interesting to other people. But, to borrow an insight from Brian Eno, the best way to do that is to follow your curiosity and then build a frame around the result so it makes sense to others afterward .

Noticing this makes me realize another reason I’ve been out of it. I have fallen for the cardinal sin when looking for interestingness: I’ve wanted what I find interesting to be interesting to others, too. Even at the first larval stage. I’ve wanted, in an unarticulated way, to be able to point at ideas that fascinate me and have people say, “Wow, ... See more

Thinking about it a bit more, I realize that looking for the fun is a special case of a more general insight. There are other emotional cues that point toward the interesting, besides fun. Laura Deming, for example, describes her curiosity as a kind of rage (“ but what in Newton’s name is heat actually????? What is temperature????” ).