I sat bolt upright in my sleeping bag as I heard a sound. What was it? A twig? A leaf? A bear? It was pitch black in the middle of the night. I was alone. I fumbled for the bear spray nearby as I had rehearsed several times during the day. As the old firearm training adage goes, “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.”
Why was I there?
Curiosity. One of the core human motivations: the desire to explore, to learn, to know. I remember, as many young children do, incessantly wondering “Why? Why? Why?” like a mantra. “How does this work? Why is it like that?” It likely drove my dad so nuts he bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door to door salesman, almost certainly for my benefit. I grew up in the pre-Internet age before hyperlinking and a casual Google search could serve up any fact in seconds. Curiosity has played an immensely pivotal role in my development not only as an intellectual but across other domains including the emotional and spiritual. As a young boy fascinated by science, World Book enabled research on topics like nuclear fission and quantum mechanics for school public speaking assignments.
Widely regarded as a positive quality, curiosity is responsible for exploration and fuels all manner of human achievement. But is it a case that more is better? Is there a dark side to curiosity? While there is no shortage of trivial pursuits and the adage “majoring in minor things,” byproducts of low curiosity strike me as obvious: close-mindedness, bigotry, fundamentalism, self-righteousness. As highly curious myself, I’m more intrigued by investigating the downsides of my disposition.
Personally, I’ve felt afflicted with existential angst for most of my adolescent and adult life – at times it has seemed like an unending daily existential crisis. Questions of life purpose, nihilism and preponderance to self-absorbed philosophical considerations whiled away large swaths of time, no doubt a luxury afforded by modern living conditions and a disease of affluence. An exemplary first world problem. Yet it also brought me to spirituality for which I am grateful.
On the mystical side, as an exercise in considering cases of excessive curiosity, I suppose that while living in perpetual states of wonder and awe would be pleasant, it seems dubious they would be well-fitted to demands of modern living. Mental disorders of excessive positive emotion like mania present many serious symptoms like delusional thinking, grandiosity and invincibility.
A more pedestrian and personal example is the “shiny object syndrome” of the Internet that entrepreneur Eben Pagan dubbed “opportunity shock”: a 21st century paradox of choice. This “shiny object syndrome” is explained well by Kelly & Conner’s Emotional Cycle Of Change pictured below: as we hit the “valley of despair” and realize a project is more difficult than we anticipated, the relief of giving up and starting something new and exciting is appealing. Rinse and repeat. Over time, hopping from opportunity to opportunity is a recipe for disappointment.
By no means exhaustive, the search term “how to make money online” is clearly illustrative of this phenomenon. I’ve seen the following during the course of my adult life: writing online, multi-level marketing, real estate investing, day trading, cryptocurrency and blockchain, digital and internet marketing (itself a fairly large umbrella category that includes search engine optimization, social media, media buying, copywriting, funnel building), graphic design, becoming an influencer, YouTube creator, Kindle publishing, E-commerce, affiliate marketing, web development, and so on.
In short, it has been said we live in the attention economy and it is precisely curiosity that modulates the disruption, capturing and retention of attention. Sophistications in marketing and technology have co-opted curiosity for commercial interests. We have only to look at how much Big Tech has flourished in the past couple of decades. Our attention is worth trillions of dollars. Internet search, advertising, entertainment – curiosity underpins them all.
On the flip side to the commodification of curiosity, a dysfunctional relationship with boredom also emerges. Boredom has become intolerable and effectively avoidable in perpetuity with the endless scroll of another show, another game, another meme. Distractions are omnipresent and the capacity to focus deeply seems increasingly rarer. Creativity and imagination are likely diminished without sufficient exposure to boredom. A cottage industry of apps and tools like Freedom and RescueTime for improving productivity and managing our relationship with technology has surfaced (technology for managing technology is pretty meta). Equally ironic, Nir Eyal, the same author that addressed addictive product design in Hooked, followed up with Indistractable to manage attention. Books like Cal Newport’s Deep Work are perennial bestsellers.
What is to be done about this corruption of curiosity?
While limitations and intentional technological usage and management present likely solutions, renegotiating our relationship with boredom may prove useful. There is an uptick in the practice of “dopamine detoxing” involving abstinence from varying sources of stimulation for a period of time (e.g. food, technology, social interactions, caffeine, information).
To answer the question posed during the opening scene, I was backcountry camping alone in Golden Ears Provincial Park for three days without food as an assignment given by a trusted teacher. As hunger is to the body, boredom is for the mind. Despite it being my predominant state (I would estimate anywhere between 65-80% of my time was spent bored), I meditated, journaled and reflected while staving off an onslaught of mosquitoes during the remainder. I quickly learned I was not so Zen that I could resist the impulse to swat the swarm of bloodsuckers. It was an exercise in self-awareness, self-knowledge, and simply being with myself. I had ample time to review my life up until then, at one point spontaneously meditating on salient memories year by year. While it was suggested I endeavor to stay up through the night, my sleep drive overpowered any such motivations as my circadian rhythms were reset. I faced fear, boredom, anxiety, impatience, loneliness and became incredibly sensitive to both my inner and outer worlds.
I confess that even with my relatively extensive background of practice in mindfulness and meditation, I must remain vigilant against the allure and attentional capture of modern technologies. And yet the solution to recovering our relationship with curiosity is painfully simple: leave the phone at home, go for a long walk in the woods and give ourselves permission to be bored. It’s worth it.