In 1935 a cartoon ran showing two miners spotting Eleanor Roosevelt coming and reacting with open dread. She wrote about it afterward, in an essay for the Saturday Evening Post called In Defense of Curiosity, and what strikes me is that she had to defend it at all. People had made it clear to her that something was off about a woman who wanted to see that much and know that much. Her answer is the line everybody still quotes: "I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity."

Read it as a recommendation and it's pleasant enough. Read it knowing she wrote it while being mocked in the national press for asking too many questions, and it's something else. She wasn't praising a virtue. She was defending the thing she was being shamed for.

Ninety years on, nobody is going to shame you for being curious. Curiosity is a job requirement now, a personality trait people claim on their profiles. What's quietly gone sideways is something harder to notice, because it doesn't look like a loss at all.

The Thing I Keep Coming Back To

We have more access to information than any generation that has ever lived, and I think less ownership over what we're interested in.

Those two don't cancel out. They compound. The access is real, and it arrives bundled with something that decides what to do with it on your behalf. You can learn almost anything, instantly, for free. You just didn't pick the question.

What I Can Actually Point To

The best bets I've made on myself came from following something I was genuinely interested in when there was no payoff visible, nobody applauding, and no way to explain why it mattered.

Some of that is the obvious intellectual kind. I spent a serious stretch of my life on why Solomon shows up under that name when he was given another one, on what the structure of John's gospel is doing with sevens, on Jung's Red Book, on whether Proverbs and Ecclesiastes can be held at the same time by the same man. None of it was trending. None of it had a credential attached, and none of it was ever going to show up on a resume. I wrote about it because I couldn't let it go, and I built a two hundred line journaling tool for the same reason.

But the one that actually rearranged my life was smaller than any of that, and frankly dumber.

I played college football in Minnesota, twelve hours from home. I had offers inside a four hour radius, which is what a sensible person takes, and I went to Minnesota anyway. Because of how that stretch went, I ended up enlisting. And because I then spent weeks sitting around waiting to leave for basic training with nothing but time on my hands, I got curious enough to go visit a buddy at USC.

That's the whole decision. A guy with some open weeks going to see a friend in another state.

While I was out there I met someone who became my mentor, and he told me to learn how to code. I was twenty years old and I had never heard of software engineering. Not as a career I'd considered and passed on. As a thing that existed.

I'm a software engineer at AWS now.

Trace that backwards and it makes no sense. If I take the reasonable school four hours from home, I'm not in Minnesota, I don't end up enlisting off the back of it, I'm not killing time before basic, I'm never on that campus, I don't meet him, and nobody ever tells me the word for the thing I do all day. Not one link in that chain was justifiable in advance. The only thing carrying me from each one to the next was being interested enough to go.

I've written about the exposure problem underneath this, that you can't dream what nobody has shown you. What I'd add now is the step that comes before exposure. Somebody has to want to go look.

The useful part always arrives later and sideways. That's the property that makes curiosity impossible to plan, and impossible to fake.

I've also got a live example of what the real thing looks like when it's somebody else's. A friend I see at work and at the gym goes deep on whatever has its hooks in him, Scripture one week and some company or investing rabbit hole the next. It's infectious, and it's infectious specifically because it isn't performed. He's not working an angle. He just actually wants to know, and that turns out to be contagious in a way that strategic interest never is.

What Started Deciding Instead

Here's the part that's easy to say badly. The complaint isn't that people follow trends, because people have always followed trends. It's that the machinery got much better at a specific job, which is telling you what deserves your attention before you've had a chance to decide.

A feed doesn't only show you things. It continuously signals what's interesting, what's worth learning, which career is desirable, which books matter, which hobbies read as impressive, and eventually which questions are even worth asking. Do that for long enough and imitation starts wearing curiosity's clothes. You feel the pull, you follow it, and the whole thing has the texture of genuine interest. The pull just didn't originate with you.

I've written about how recommendation engines hand you a mirror instead of a window, narrowing what you see to a sharper version of what you already are. This is a layer underneath that. It isn't about the inputs getting narrower. It's about who holds the pen on the question list in the first place.

And it rhymes with something I've gotten into before, which is that desire mostly gets copied rather than generated. People want the car because somebody rapped about it. The piece I didn't work out then is that interest copies the same way desire does, and it's far better camouflaged. Wanting the Corvette is at least legible as wanting. Wanting to learn a thing feels like the most interior act there is. It feels like yours by definition. That's what makes it the easier one to borrow without noticing.

The Honest Version

I have to be careful here, because there's a dumb version of this argument where every interest you got from another person is suspect, and that's just wrong.

Nearly everything I care about arrived through somebody else. I didn't derive Adler from first principles, or Jung, and Cal Newport and Jocko both shaped how I work. I found all of them the way everyone finds everything, through someone who got there first. Exposure is how intellectual life works. You can't be curious about something you've never encountered, and other people are the main way encountering happens.

So the razor isn't where it came from. It's whether you can still tell the difference between these two sentences:

I found this through someone else.

I want this because everyone seems to want it.

The first is how learning has always worked. The second is a status move with a learning costume on. The failure isn't borrowing. It's losing the ability to run that check, because once you can't tell them apart, you'll spend years on things you never actually wanted to know.

The test I use is embarrassingly simple. Would I still be into this if nobody ever found out I was into it? If the honest answer is no, I'm not curious. I'm positioning.

It Also Has to Survive Being Bad at It

There's a second test, and I only know about it because I nearly failed it. It's the one where you mistake being bad at something for not being interested in it.

I was bad at data structures and algorithms. Not modest about it, actually bad. React never clicked for me either. And the conclusion sitting right there, the one anybody would have validated if I'd said it out loud, was that I'd found my ceiling and should go find something I had a talent for.

What I did instead was keep moving sideways. I pushed into backend, then into data, then into the infrastructure sitting underneath both, mostly because I kept wanting to know how the thing actually worked once you got past the part everybody looks at. Cloud and distributed systems is where I ended up genuinely expert, and I got there through the parts of the field I was worst at rather than around them.

Borrowed interest doesn't survive that. If you took a subject up because it reads well, the first long stretch of being visibly bad at it ends the relationship, because the whole point was how it looked and right now it looks bad. Real curiosity is strangely durable under humiliation. It keeps asking the question while you're embarrassed, and that's the most reliable signal I know that an interest is actually yours.

Curiosity Doesn't Owe You a Return

This is the part I think gets the least attention, and it might be doing the most damage.

We've developed a reflex where every interest has to justify itself. You get into something, and almost immediately the question arrives: could this be a side hustle, could this be content, is this a skill, what's the application. Reading becomes professional development. A hobby becomes a brand. The interest gets conscripted about four weeks in, and the conscription is usually fatal, because now there's an expected return and the thing has to perform.

But the whole reason curiosity is valuable is that it's unpredictable. It sends you down paths whose usefulness you could not possibly argue for in advance. That's not a bug you need to manage. That's the mechanism. Originality tends to come from exactly the corners nobody could justify visiting, which is precisely why they were still empty when you got there. The moment you only allow yourself interests you can already defend, you've restricted yourself to the ones everybody can see the value of, and those are crowded by definition.

I've written before that curiosity needs direction and that I keep a running list of questions, some of them sitting there for years. What I'd add is that the list has to be allowed to contain things that will never pay. If every open question on it has a plausible return attached, somebody else wrote the list.

What Protecting It Looks Like

Not much, and nothing dramatic. Mostly it's noticing.

It helps to know where your inputs are coming from. Most of what shapes me now I went and got rather than received: a book I chose, a podcast I subscribed to, a writer I already trust, a song I chased down because it scored some scene in a movie. Nothing was served to me. The deciding happened on my end, and that turns out to be the whole difference.

It also helps to keep a couple of questions around that have no application whatsoever. Not as a discipline. As a check. If you can't name one thing you're currently interested in that would be impossible to monetize, explain, or post about, that's worth sitting with for a minute.

Roosevelt was defending curiosity against people who thought a woman had no business wanting to know that much. Nobody's going to come after you for being curious now. The pressure runs the other way, and it's much softer than a cartoon in the paper. It just quietly hands you the list and lets you believe you wrote it.