On Curiosity and its Consequences
Curiosity: it’s a powerful thing. Without curiosity we wouldn’t have all the knowledge and technology and other amazing things that we have today. Curiosity is what provides the drive for humans to desire to learn more, to wonder, to ponder and try to figure things out. The problem with curiosity is that you can sometimes find out what you didn’t want to know in the first place (or did you?). We all know it as the following proverb:
Curiosity killed the cat.
I personally subscribe to the following:
Curiosity killed the cat – but satisfaction brought it back.
You might be wondering where I’m going with this (piqued your curiosity, perhaps?). I recently followed a curiosity inspired ‘trip’ -if you will- and while the results were not what I wanted, maybe they were, to a point. My inquisitiveness drove me to the point where I just had to prove or disprove what I thought I already knew from the initial discovery. It’s like I saw a little bit of information that was contrary to what I’d been informed, and once there, I had to continue in order to further prove what I had seen, or disprove it. Part of me wanted the disproof, as I didn’t want to believe that I’d been misled – but the other part of me just wanted to continue on and see what else would support this new, contradictory information.
In the respect that curiosity provides the desire or the inquisitiveness to learn more, it also provides the detriment that you may discover that which you did not want to know. In most cases it’s a beneficial thing – you find out more about a subject, a person, an item, a place, a thing, etc. But in other situations you learn information that you may have been better off not knowing. It is hard to strike a balance between the two, mostly because as you discover more, your curiosity likely deepens. Sort of like a train wreck – you just can’t help but look.
I feel like I am babbling. I guess what it boils down to is that curiosity is a strong influence, and it allows you to sometimes go beyond where you probably wanted to go (in the bad sense). I guess it requires a discipline to ensure that curiosity does not rule you to the point that it’s a bad influence and that it remains a useful influence. Unfortunately sometimes even with discipline you end up finding out more than you bargained for.