Chapter (and book) by Elizabeth Weingarten: “Questions flow from curiosity. If we want to live and love the questions of our lives—How to live a life of purpose? Who am I in the aftermath of a big change or transition? What kind of person do I want to become as I grow older?—we must first ask them into conscious existence.
Many people have written entire books defining and redefining curiosity. But for me, the most helpful definition comes from a philosophy professor, Perry Zurn, and a systems neuroscientist, Dani Bassett: “For too long—and still too often—curiosity has been oversimplified,” they write, typically “reduced to the simple act of raising a hand or voicing a question, especially from behind a desk or a podium. . . . Scholars generally boil it down to ‘information-seeking’ behavior or a ‘desire to know.’ But curiosity is more than a feeling and certainly more than an act. And curiosity is always more than a single move or a single question.”Curiosity works, they write, by “linking ideas, facts, perceptions, sensations and data points together.”It is complex, mutating, unpredictable, and transformational. It is, fundamentally, an act of connection, an act of creating relationships between ideas and people. Asking questions then, becoming curious, is not just about wanting to find the answer—it is also about our need to connect, with ourselves, with others, with the world.
And this, perhaps, is why our deeper questions are hardly ever satisfied by Google or by fast, easy answers from the people I refer to as the Charlatans of Certainty—the gurus, influencers, and “experts” peddling simple solutions to all the complex problems you face. This is also the reason there is no one-size-fits-all formula for cultivating curiosity—particularly the kind that allows us to live and love our questions, especially the questions that are hard to love, like “How can I live with chronic pain?” or “How do I extricate myself from a challenging relationship?” This kind of curiosity is a special flavor…(More)”. See also: Inquiry as Infrastructure: Defining Good Questions in the Age of Data and AI.