Candide's Garden: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Explore early
Converge on a workable worldview
Defend it
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.

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.

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

Candide's Garden

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

I was Curious ...