Introduction to My Personal Philosophy of Curiosity
I go by The Curious Hermit on social media.
Curiosity is core to my identity, so much so that I was a bit stunned it had never occurred to me to explore a "philosophy of curiosity" until it came up in a content brainstorming session with ChatGPT.
On social media, I've built an audience on multiple platforms through conversational content mostly focused on just talking about my life and what interests me.
That turns out to be quite interesting for many people. My life seems quite mundane to me, but because I've taken on the identity of Queer Heretic Nun and live an autonomous life where I get to spend all my time studying and playing, people are quite interested in it.
I'm also (as of writing this in 2024) a full-time student finishing my bachelor's in philosophy, twenty years after pausing it because life went sideways on my.
In the intervening years, I spent as much time as I could following my curiosity. Absorbing as much information as I could across a variety of fields.
I keep returning to philosophy because it's where we can synthesize all the information we get from the more specialized perspectives into a broader worldview.
The goal is not to reinforce my existing worldview, it's to map my worldview more accurately to reality.
A lifelong task.
So I'm exploring Philosophy of Curiosity.
There's even a book The Philosophy of Curiosity that I snagged through the University library research access as soon as I learned about it.
That's what this Deep Dive series is about.
Exploring Philosophy of Curiosity as a subfield of philosophy, and also, exploring and developing my own personal Philosophy of Curiosity.
As this series develops, I'll be adding more and more content on the topic:
- Notes here in my digital garden that will evolve over time
- Resource and literature notes that will include what I've highlighted in various source material that I'm exploring so I can more easily link those to my notes
- Paragraph, Substack, and Medium articles - they'll all be the same, but each platform has different audiences to reach.
- Podcasts that are a mix of me talking about what I'm learning, what I'm critiquing, what questions that's sparking, along with NotebookLM-generated AI podcasts, which are super helpful for me in prepping to do these deep dives.
- AI-generated study guides and reflection questions for applying the philosophy to real life.
I'm aiming for one essay a month and one podcast a month for this series, as well as for the Curious Dialogues series that I'm doing. Diving into curiosity will be a nice balance to diving into the political divide between the left and the right, as well as how to inspire critical thinking as more than just a skill to be learned, but an active process and way of engaging with reality.
Both of these Deep Dive series will most definitely lead to a LOT of different tangents to explore.
Academics has created siloes of thinking where you hone in on a very specific discipline and that's your life's work.
Which is fine for some people, but not for me.
My most intrinsic motivation is curiosity, and I just want to see what it uncovers when I let it do its thing.