Curiosity

It’s easy to romanticize being younger for erroneous reasons — and I am a creature of nostalgia, which isn’t a good look at the best of times — but I do think that a mixture of free time, naivety, and curiosity led me to more interesting places when I was younger. In a first-year film studies course in university, I wrote a paper on film adaptations of the works of Philip K. Dick, mostly because I liked Blade Runner and Minority Report. And yet the act of choosing to write on the topic led me to read a PKD biography and many of his short stories that I may never have encountered otherwise.

Writing the paper also got me to watch Paycheck, the 2003 Ben Affleck movie, which is objectively bad but made sense for the purpose of the project. I think I had the time to evaluate activities on the criteria of “will this be interesting?”, which is much better than the current state of “is this worth my time?”, which took root sometime between then and now. Some days I worry it’s taken over, like weeds in a disused garden bed.

There’s probably a longer thing to be said here about social media and reward mechanisms of the internet being tuned against deep attention, but others have written much more eloquently than me on it, plus it’s late and I need to sleep. Maybe I’ll revisit another time, but the point is:

My goal for 2025 is the rekindling of my sense of curiosity, as well as the intentional use of my time to cultivate it. I’m hoping this site will serve, among other things, as a record of that cultivation.