While chatting with a friend a few weeks ago, we were discussing token incentives for memecoins. I made an offhand comment about curiosity with the phrase “curiosity rewards always,” which I’d noted here in a previous issue for those eagle-eyed readers and was asked to dig into this a bit more.

Since then, I’ve begun to explore my own relationship with curiosity through the lens of how these mechanisms could potentially benefit various onchain communities and the artists inhabiting them. Particularly, as it relates to how we, and I, see this evolution of wonder expanding as we intersect with increasingly intelligent artificial beings.

Beyond this fascination with curiosity, I also wanted to discover the connection to this ever-present hunger for learning and the often unseen consequences of overcoming the looming sense of overwhelm.

My Relationship With Curiosity

I’m incredibly thankful to be a Millennial for the simple fact I remember a childhood filled with curiosity before the internet really took off.

It wasn’t but around 5 years after I was born that AOL trial discs landed in hundreds of thousands of mailboxes across the country. Before the internet finally hit my household, my primary modes of curious entertainment were playing aimlessly outside, reading Chicken Soup for the Soul books, or episodes of Wishbone, Mr. Rogers, and The Magic School Bus on PBS.

For me, harnessing boredom by channeling it into curious thinking and observation has led to an immense amount of self-learning.

At the same time, I’ve noticed many of us have sort of lost our ability to cultivate this curious nature as we cater to god-like algorithms and increasingly shortened memetic cycles.

This is in no small part due to the lobotomizing effects of late-stage social networks with their mind-numbing media and the unthinking nature of grotesquely boring content streamed directly into our brains.

Actually, it is this adoration of learning and exploration that I offer self-love and service through curiosity. I realize that not everyone is filled with this extremely curious nature, this yearning for learning, if you will.

How do we possibly adapt to an internet fraught with playing into an attention-based economy that desires virality, one that requires an insatiable hunger for celebrity as sustenance?

We rebel through softness, service, love, and care for our fellow web dwellers.

In order to effectively gather information, one must adapt several filters in the mind with which all input gets sifted through, like a baker’s flour ready for a new batch of cookies. This prevents impurities in the thought process and helps us fight the urge to run to the next shiny object.

It’s one thing to casually tinker with the idea of exploring one’s own curious nature, but when things begin to tip into full-time, always-on exploration, it can become quite dangerous for those mind filters.

The term “mind palace,” if you’ve heard of it, comes into play here as well. It isn’t only used for memory, a la Sherlock Holmes, though that is certainly one way to use it. Often, it’s a place of retreat, a place where I go to sit in contemplation. It’s how I can gather tons and tons of data every day and still recall with accuracy when the tiniest bit warrants sharing. Tending to this mind palace so it doesn’t decay, crumble, and rot away is critical for curiosity to flourish.

As I regularly sit to ponder on the information I’ve gathered, an incredibly important step in this venture is a meditative process cycling between:

3-4 hours of focused hunting + gathering

Followed by a long walk or nap

The key piece here is not to overcomplicate it or overwork the brain to total exhaustion. It’s an exercise in curiosity, not a sprint to genius.

If you’ve ever experienced burnout, you’ll have likely searched how to avoid it to find that there are 7 types of rest to employ: physical, mental, emotional, creative, social, spiritual, and sensory. And yes, we should all integrate these practices into our routine when forming habits of curiosity.

Often, these memetic cycles we are forever entwined divert our attention towards side-quests that are wholly unintuitive or separate from our need for consistency, resulting in a more frequent feeling of burnout and less desire for contemplative curiosity.

This is where both the joy of missing out and solitude come into play in our practice of pondering.

The Busybody makes it their business to know anything and everything, fluttering around from topic to topic like a butterfly.

The Hunter is focused on the hunt, tracking down new discoveries as if sniffing out the landscape for the bits of info leading to a catch.

The Dancer relies on imagination leaping through learning gracefully on the dance floor atop beds of information.

Over time, when practicing your own connection to curiosity, you may find new archetypes yet undiscovered by Zurn and Bassett’s modern philosophy of curiosity, but these three are an excellent start.