Independent thinking and Curiosity

At a young age, we are inherently hungry to learn more about how things work, and we have a burning desire to consume as much information as possible. But for some reason, our curiosity generally wanes over time as we are satisfied with what we know because of all the mental shortcuts that we get used to. When was the last time you were amazed by how your phone took photos or some mundane activity that was not trivial when you first came across it but it became something you took for granted? We fail to appreciate the growing ignorance in our minds and the number of ‘Why’s we ask decreases with time . If you ever read Leonardo da Vinci’s biography you realize that his burning desire to know how everything worked just for curiosity’s sake was really powerful and it served as fuel for his creative endeavors. You don’t have to be like Leonardo exactly because my man made detailed observations of the most minute of things like the tongue of a hummingbird, but you get the idea. If you find yourself asking the trite question: “What is the point of it all”, you probably realize that it is to ask the right questions about the world you live in to get to a deeper level of understanding which makes us ask even more questions (what a beautiful loop). At the same time, it is easy to get lost in the age of information abundance and you got to have a filter in your brain that asks the fundamental questions that allow you to understand an idea from first principles before allowing it to consume some space in that limited memory of yours.

I don’t know how much curiosity can help one with daily tasks, but I assume that it works the ‘muscles’ of your mind and makes you more of an independent thinker, which just sounds like an attractive deal. Independent thinking is a mixture of curiosity, disliking being told how to think, not giving a shit about what the “norm” is, and looking for answers in places where most people don’t. Now all of the above things sound very exciting in principle but when you have bills to pay that 9-5 corporate job where you don’t have to think too hard and figure things out for yourselves on a daily basis, it becomes too attractive. In the definition of independent thinking, I mentioned our tendency to follow the crowd (I am just as guilty as the average person), which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective where you had to fit into your forager squad to avoid getting deserted which would result in you getting speared by the opposing tribes or eaten by a wild predator. However, in 2021 the odds of you dying from not having enough food are lower than those of dying from too much food, so you don’t really “need” to stick to the norm to “survive”, at least from the most primal definition of survival.

Now I am not insinuating that you should completely detach from society, rather you could use some of the principles of independent thinking just for the sake of learning, challenging established ideas and getting good at asking the “right” questions. Who knows, maybe you get you find a question that only you can answer.