Curiosity has a funny way of rewarding action sometimes. Normally people only mention the highlights of curiosity – the exploration, the quirky discoveries, the interesting facts gleaned from odd experiences and strange people met along the way.
What doesn’t get mentioned so much is how hard it can be to live with. One gets bored with an otherwise perfectly acceptable life if there is not at least a trickle of curiosity-worthy material. Being bored with one's life is a slow poison. It is an ally of depression and they are both distant cousins (in my case) to eating binges. Ah, potatoes.
But I digress.
The main difficulty I find in this yearning to know about things, is that although it is easy enough to find out, it is then very very hard to keep quiet about the picture eventually drawn by all these points of data. Generally other people are not interested or they would have already googled it for themselves. Take as an example the methane plumes in the Arctic that are in the news this month. That sounds interesting doesn't it? Sounds also a bit like bad news too - isn't methane a greenhouse gas? Yup, twenty times more so than carbon dioxide. Oh shitbags. What will that mean for sea levels and polar bears and weather weirding?? Well probably a lot but no-one has a guaranteed divination method for anything other than "maybe this, maybe that" (all of which are sobering enough). Still, at last we're having the conversation.
Oh no. Wait. We're not are we?
New Zealand might be.
Maybe it is because we live so far away. If we lived closer we would care.
Oh wait, the Earth is a globe, all that water up the top is connected to all our water down below....
See what happens? One question leads to another. And thence to another and so on until my mind if full and I spin out of my chair and trip over my feet falling into fevered-dream sleep. Perhaps I exaggerate that loop a little for narrative tension, but you get my point.
Lots of data. Lots of consequences. Not a lot of ideas about what to do with this knowledge or (one step further) what to do in response (well actually the established ideas all involve individuals using and consuming less, and no-one wants to be the first to blink). Instead our news is filled with predicable politically flavoured blandals (like scandals only really really bland) and circus gossip.
This isn't the first topic this little pattern has repeated itself on either. You'd think I would resist the urge to scratch the curiosity itch. I've tried. It doesn't work.
Curiosity killed the cat but a life unqueried is unlivable.
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