A Funny Thing About Curiosity

It feels to me like everyone has something unrepeatable to bring into the world. And we can manifest it by going in our direction of maximal interestingness. The pattern we make as our curiosity pulls us hither and thither like a dog chasing a smell across a field—that pattern is a gift we give the world.

The reason nothing has felt interesting to me, I thought, is that I’ve forgotten the most important thing for me: the path of maximal interestingness is supposed to feel like fun. Not fun as in “I feel entertained” but fun as in, “this is engrossing and self-surprising, life-affirming and a little scary.” Fun, the way Eno and Byrne are having fun in the quote above.

The more general point, then, is: interestingness, the compulsion to know, is not a property of an idea; it is a cluster of emotions. You can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly. You have to look for that thing that surges up in you—surges like rage, like laughter, like sadness—when you encounter clues.