Curiosity Is a Muscle, and Most of Us Have Stopped Using It

I’m going to sound like someone’s grandmother for a moment (which I am not, quite yet). We have more tools to learn things than any generation before us, and somehow, we’ve gotten worse at the most basic form of learning there is: just being curious.

For me, curiosity has become something I sometimes have to choose on purpose. Reading up on a subject I know nothing about, on my own, just to understand it a little better, that scratches the itch. But the kind of curiosity that feeds my creative work the most isn’t about subjects at all. It’s about people.

Curiosity is also an act of openness

We’re living through genuinely hard times. Politics, the climate, the general noise of it all. I won’t list it exhaustively, you know exactly what I mean. And one of the quieter casualties of all this is our sense of community. We argue with strangers online. We’ve half forgotten how to say hello to someone we pass on the street. It’s easy to become socially guarded without noticing it’s happened. And it’s very hard to nourish your creativity when you’ve quietly closed the door on other people.

So when I do get the chance to spend time with someone I don’t know well, I try to actually open up to them. To learn who they are, on purpose, instead of skimming past them.

Sometimes what I learn doesn’t sit well with me, and honestly, that person just becomes excellent material for the villain in whatever I’m writing next. But far more often, choosing curiosity over judgment helps me understand someone, and then genuinely like them, in a way I wouldn’t have if I’d stayed on the surface.

Digging under the small talk

There’s something satisfying about knowing you’ve gone deeper than the weather and the traffic. It takes a little intention: thinking about how you approach someone, steering small talk somewhere realer, actually listening for who a person is underneath the version they lead with.

And what you find down there is often small treasure: a story, a way of seeing the world, a life you didn’t expect. I write these down constantly, or talk them straight into my voice memos before I lose the shape of them. Some of my favorite prompts I’ve ever written started as a five minute conversation with someone I almost didn’t bother talking to.

A gentle note

Curiosity about other people isn’t just good manners. It’s raw material. Every person you actually get to know is a door into a story, a character, a perspective you didn’t have yesterday. Practicing it on purpose, especially now, when it would be easier not to, might be one of the most reliable creativity habits there is.