I have this weird line in all my self-introductions. “I am so curious that if I were a cat, I would have died a long time ago.”
I have been extremely curious and nerdy throughout my life. The kind of curiosity that makes me go down rabbit holes at 2 pm when I am supposed to work and 2 am when I am supposed to sleep. I remember playing Age of Mythology as a 10-year-old (I know, I am quite old) and going on to read everything and anything related to Greek mythology. Although I fell asleep after two pages of Homer's Iliad, I loved reading and learning about it.
So I will try to see if and how I can use the one thing I have been consistently doing for the last three decades.
Sidebar: One problem I have with today's curiosity is its specialised nature. You are rewarded for being curious only about one thing with a high chance of getting exhausted by it eventually. So everywhere in this piece, I am talking more about general curiosity. (the less popular, second cousin of general relativity)
Ooga booga to #oogabooga
Curiosity drives our actions and behaviours. It’s quite internal and it comes out of a very primary place of human existence and more importantly a primitive part of our brain. The itch to know what’s behind the bush, the urge to explore beyond the forest, and the eagerness to know what fire does, eventually lead to an 'ouch'.
People in white lab coats have analysed our brains to realise the satiating curiosity gets some good quality ‘d’! and by ‘d’ I definitely mean the only reason for our existence, dopamine themselves. Since dopamine is the magic chemical that is being thrown around for every other seemingly good thing, I am not so sure about this.
Wikipedia is the best evidence for the bottomless stomach of human curiosity. I attribute the success of the internet to curiosity alone. Wait, science literally is the effort to quench that curiosity right?
Even social media influencers are guilty of this. One thing I keep seeing in my recent social media feed is the ever-increasing, what I like to call, two-minute "Did You Know" videos. With good lighting and a ton of AI-generated images, I get to know weird facts and opinions in less than 120 seconds from the content creators. I mean, this is the 2025 equivalent of the "Tell Me Why" kids magazines from my childhood.
Cost and the curious
Addressing curiosity comes with a cost, as do everything in life and it is completely normal. After all, paying for what you want is the world in which we live today.
Curiosity literally costs money. Internet, books, classes, courses. Almost all sources of knowledge cost money.
If there is a source of free knowledge, then you will be paying your time and attention. There is a reason we call this the ‘attention economy'. This leads to the hidden, and often, the biggest cost. The goddamn opportunity cost. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s just the cost of getting that information, knowledge and skill by addressing the curiosity.
This is no way of me saying to myself, 'Imagine all the money you could make if you didn’t spend all the time on the internet'. In fact, I have a profound disdain for ‘Linkedin (often Instagram) fin-fluencers’ who preach that one should spend every hour of their day making money. Fuck them.
I think this sense of general curiosity helps me connect with my systems and people around me in my own way.
I mean, if I spend an hour reading about…I don’t know octopuses and how scientists believe that they are sentient, I will say that the fact we don’t know so much about these almost alien beauties is mind-blowing and you will feel that rush of wonder. This appreciation of nature and genuine beauty is infectious. Now imagine how wonderful it would be for people to meet someone who is curious about octopuses. Even in a Japanese tentacle fixation way. (no kink-shaming here.)
In conclusion, if curiosity actually did kill the cat, what’s the big deal? I mean, we all are gonna die anyway.
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