Curiosity is the Cheat Code

Curiosity is one of the few skills appreciating in value while almost everything else gets quietly commoditized by AI. The World Economic Forum lists curiosity among the top human-centric skills for 2030, alongside creativity, adaptability, empathy, and critical thinking. Microsoft, Deloitte, EY — every firm tracking AI adoption is converging on the same idea. In a moment when AI is reshaping every aspect of how we work, curiosity is our most important advantage as humans. AI can give you an answer to almost anything. It can't decide what's worth asking. 

Which is funny, because curiosity has never had less cultural infrastructure. Algorithms feed us what we already like. Discovery happens by accident, if at all. Most of the apps we use are designed to keep us still, not send us anywhere. And collectively, we're the worst we've ever been at sitting with a question long enough for it to become interesting.

But here's the part I keep coming back to — and the reason I built this site.

Curiosity isn't just a career skill. It's the entry point to something much bigger.

Follow a curiosity far enough and you eventually run into awe. That moment when something is larger or stranger or more beautiful than you expected, and your sense of self gets briefly, usefully small. Dacher Keltner, the Berkeley psychologist who's spent over two decades measuring this stuff, has found that awe isn't only a feeling, it’s a measurable physiological event. When you feel awe, the default mode network in your brain deactivates, which the opposite of fight-or-flight physiology. That's the part of the cortex that runs your ego's narration loop; for a moment, it goes quiet. Awe also triggers dopamine, which sharpens attention, increases curiosity, and motivates exploration — meaning the very thing that produced the awe makes you hungrier for more of it. Other documented effects include calming inflammation, activating the vagus nerve, deactivating the brain's stress center, and reducing pain perception. 

The thing we've long called spiritual turns out to also be biological. And after twenty years of teaching a course called The Science of Happiness, Keltner has said his answer to how to live a good life is, basically: find awe. 

Which means the unsexy little practice of being curious — actually pulling the thread, actually walking the long way home, actually asking the second question — is wired directly into the same neural circuitry as joy.

And almost no one is doing it.

I work in culture for a living. I watch what people pay attention to, what they share, what they ignore. The pattern I see most often is people saying they want to feel more alive, more connected, more themselves — and then spending their evenings inside algorithmic loops designed to make them feel exactly the opposite. They want happiness; they've been handed engagement. They want awe; they've been handed novelty.

The bridge between the life people are actually living and the one they say they want is, I think, curiosity. The willingness to walk around. To find out.

That's what this site is for. Some of it will be cultural observation, because that's my job. Some of it will be tools and prompts and small expeditions. Sometimes it'll just be me following something that caught my eye and writing down what I noticed.

You're welcome to come along.