Curiosity serves you in your early years as you learn about the world; a rapid ascent up the learning curve is what allows you to survive to reproductive age in the wild. But once you’ve figured out how your world works, that same curiosity is more likely to kill you in your later years if it pushes you to explore beyond the safety of your core routines.
A life without learning is a life devoid of the desire to search, explore, and learn and lacks the texture created by this desire. A life without curiosity is an empty life, a life of stasis, a life without wonder. Paraphrasing a friend on the topic, inside every eighty-year-old is a ten-year-old wondering, What the f*ck just happened? But the seeds of that sentiment are sown many years earlier. They are sown in your twenties and thirties when you stop pursuing any interests or hobbies outside your job. They are sown in your forties and fifties when you stop trying to understand the world and start saying, “That’s just the way it is.” They are sown in your sixties and seventies when you stop learning new things because you don’t see any utility in it anymore. Most people have lost touch with their inner ten-year-olds—but it’s not too late to reconnect.
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