Life Updates

 My writing itch is most satisfied with private physical notebooks.  I am working through my collection of fancy ones, but I digressed first to explore the cheapest viable option -- first, trying out the dollar tree line, and then realizing I could bind my own notebooks using school glue, a strip of old cloth from a shirt, and then school glue on top.  The resulting notebooks cost less than $1.75 from the dollar store and allow me to customize size, paper type, etc.  And the binding is much better.

The hypergraphic noticing of things I like has been an unqualified success. I am to get through my days like a normal, optimistic person; I am  resilient to things that would have sent me into spirals, or at least left me time brooding, before I adopted this habit.  Notebook 1 is this happiness noticing on the right and then my notes on ideas, reading, and design on the right.  I then write an index (really a table of contents) on the last few pages.

I keep a separate notebook for my to-do lists. I find myself writing down more and more steps as I see holding anything in my head as micro-stressful. But I still run into push-back friction on certain items. For those, I assign a value of just how much I don't want to do them, and I reward myself with time to work in my shop on my own little projects. (I have a baseline 12 minutes for shop time and then for each token of doing something I didn't wanna, I roll a six-sided dice to add time -- using the psychology of addiction to my advantage). 

 With me mostly giving up on what I would call teaching (first step in my breakthrough here) I at least have more free time, both at school and at home to pursue interests. So my soul feels less trapped. 

 The last thing to fix was my commute. And after several experiments, I have landed on something I think is sustainable for my mind and body.  1. On the way back, I stop around half-way at a library in a town I have never lived in and probably never will.  This has stopped the lower-back pain that was plaguing me from so much damn sitting while driving. 2. Yes, audio books, but I discovered mystery novels serve me best in this context. 

 All in all, life is in fact good.  

I was Curious ...

 

I prompted Datum with: 

Children are curious, very curious. Adults almost never are. In fact, anti-curious about anything that doesn't get them status. I used to think that "society beat it out of them." Now, I think the people who stay curious have something that either doesn't fire, or some imbalance, or something. Speculate. Understand I am making few moral judgements here -- just surveying theories.

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Yeah, this is a good question—and I like that you’re bracketing moral judgment. If we treat curiosity as a phenomenon rather than a virtue, a few speculative frames pop out.

I’ll throw out clusters of theories rather than argue for one.

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1. Curiosity as default vs. regulated state

One view: children aren’t “curious” so much as unregulated.

• Their attention systems haven’t learned what not to sample.

• Everything is prediction error. The world keeps violating expectations.

• Exploration dominates exploitation.

Adulthood flips the ratio. Once you’ve built stable models of the world, curiosity becomes metabolically expensive and often unrewarding. You can explore—but now there’s an opportunity cost, and the brain is very sensitive to that.

So curiosity fades not because it’s beaten out, but because:

• The brain learns that most novelty doesn’t pay.

• Prediction accuracy increases, reducing surprise.

• Exploitation (status, income, efficiency) becomes adaptive.

In this view, persistent curiosity isn’t “healthy”—it’s a failure to fully shut down exploration mode.

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2. Status capture of attention

You’re onto something with status.

Adult cognition is heavily incentive-hijacked:

• Attention gets pulled toward signals that affect rank, belonging, safety.

• Curiosity about irrelevant domains becomes noise.

• Questions not obviously useful feel vaguely irresponsible.

Children don’t yet have a rank to defend.

So curiosity competes poorly against:

• Reputation management

• Economic anxiety

• Social coherence

• Narrative stability (“who I am”)

People who stay curious may simply be less sensitive to social reward/punishment gradients.

Not morally better—just differently tuned.

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3. Identity crystallization (and threat avoidance)

Curiosity is destabilizing.

To be curious is to:

• Admit ignorance

• Risk disconfirmation

• Temporarily dissolve identity

Most adults spend a lot of energy maintaining coherence:

“This is who I am, what I believe, what matters.”

Curiosity threatens that scaffolding.

So one theory:

• Adults aren’t anti-curious per se

• They’re identity-protective

Children don’t yet have hardened identities. They can ask “why?” without risking ego collapse.

People who remain curious may have:

• Weaker identity attachment

• Or higher tolerance for self-incoherence

• Or less fear response to belief threat

Again: imbalance, not virtue.

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4. Neurological tuning differences

If we get a little more mechanistic:

Persistent curiosity correlates with:

• Higher novelty-seeking

• Lower baseline anxiety

• Dopamine systems that reward exploration more than closure

Adults typically shift toward:

• Predictability

• Control

• Reduced variance

Some people never quite make that shift.

That can look like:

• Intellectual playfulness

• Or distractibility

• Or chronic dissatisfaction

• Or genius

• Or impracticality

Same underlying wiring, different outcomes depending on environment.

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5. Curiosity as a luxury signal

Another cynical but plausible frame:

Curiosity flourishes when:

• Survival is secure

• Status is buffered

• Time is abundant

Children are given these conditions.

Many adults lose them.

So what looks like a psychological change might just be:

• Scarcity narrowing cognition

• Chronic low-grade stress

• Continuous evaluation

In that sense, curiosity isn’t beaten out—it’s priced out.

---

6. The “failure to converge” hypothesis

Here’s a colder take:

Most humans are meant to:

1. Explore early

2. Converge on a workable worldview

3. Defend it

4. Replicate socially/culturally

Curiosity-heavy adults may be people who:

• Never fully converged

• Never felt “done”

• Never accepted a final story

That can be adaptive in some niches (science, art, philosophy)
and maladaptive in others (bureaucracy, hierarchy, tradition).

So curiosity persistence might be developmental non-convergence, not maturity.

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7. Children aren’t curious in the way we romanticize

Last twist: we may be projecting.

Children ask “why?” compulsively, but:

• Often they don’t care about the answer

• They’re probing interaction, not truth

• It’s social bonding, not epistemology

Adult “curiosity” is rarer because it’s more costly:

• It demands sustained attention

• It risks being wrong

• It produces no immediate social payoff

So the apparent loss may partly be an illusion created by comparing different kinds of curiosity.

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A synthesis (tentative)

Put together, one neutral model might be:

• Curiosity is an early-life exploration mode

• Adulthood rewards closure, coherence, and status sensitivity

• Most people adapt accordingly

• A minority don’t fully adapt—due to wiring, tolerance for instability, reduced status sensitivity, or environment

• Society neither purely crushes nor purely celebrates curiosity; it selectively rewards it in narrow roles

Which means:

• Curious adults aren’t necessarily freer

• Uncurious adults aren’t necessarily broken

• They’re optimized for different games

If you want, we can zoom in next on:

• Whether curiosity actually declines, or just gets reallocated

• Whether modern society amplifies this split

• Or whether curiosity is overrated as a human trait at all