I find that the older I get the less curiosity for its own sake works as a motivator and the more I’m most strongly motivated to do things because I want to generate the outcomes of the work.
The standard story on this is something like age is inversely proportional to curiosity “essence”, but I think we can do a bit better than that. Some ideas of what this is happening to me and why it happens to lots of people:
changes in the brain (though this is basically a scientifically justified version of the “essence” theory)
changes in life circumstances (I’m more rewarded for getting results than effort the older I get)
knowledge saturation (the more I know the less I don’t know and so the gains from curiosity drop over time)
On knowledge saturation, there’s also a nuance there which is that I find I get most curious when I’m trying to do something and I’m looking at some narrow part of the world related to doing that something. For example, I started a new job recently and the company uses different databases than I have recently been using, so I’ve been digging in a lot to understand things about these databases and how they differ from the ones I’ve used a lot and am already expert with. I wake up excited to read about the internals of them because I know having a deep understanding about them will make me better at my job. This is a kind of “targeted” curiosity that’s a bit different than the normal “general” curiosity we think about when we talk about curiosity because it’s not interest for its own sake, but it still looks a lot like curiosity even if it is motivated.
I find that the older I get the less curiosity for its own sake works as a motivator and the more I’m most strongly motivated to do things because I want to generate the outcomes of the work.
The standard story on this is something like age is inversely proportional to curiosity “essence”, but I think we can do a bit better than that. Some ideas of what this is happening to me and why it happens to lots of people:
changes in the brain (though this is basically a scientifically justified version of the “essence” theory)
changes in life circumstances (I’m more rewarded for getting results than effort the older I get)
knowledge saturation (the more I know the less I don’t know and so the gains from curiosity drop over time)
On knowledge saturation, there’s also a nuance there which is that I find I get most curious when I’m trying to do something and I’m looking at some narrow part of the world related to doing that something. For example, I started a new job recently and the company uses different databases than I have recently been using, so I’ve been digging in a lot to understand things about these databases and how they differ from the ones I’ve used a lot and am already expert with. I wake up excited to read about the internals of them because I know having a deep understanding about them will make me better at my job. This is a kind of “targeted” curiosity that’s a bit different than the normal “general” curiosity we think about when we talk about curiosity because it’s not interest for its own sake, but it still looks a lot like curiosity even if it is motivated.