My mother has always told me that it’s important to be an interesting person. She has always been the kind of person who wants to learn everything about anything. As I grew up, I developed the same hunger to learn. I’ve always loved school and wanted to gather more knowledge about things that interested me. She always said that the more interesting you are, the more you have to share and learn from other people.
I was thinking about this as I was having a discussion with a professor the other day. She was telling me about her current class and how many of the students in the class seemed completely uninterested. Despite paying thousands of dollars for a college education, these students fell asleep in class, even during a full-length movie, which the professor saw as a treat. They simply couldn’t bother to keep their heads up or their eyes off their phone during the movie. The professor seemed distraught. She couldn’t understand how even a modern-day movie couldn’t keep the interest of these college students.
Technology has contributed to the way our generation acts today. It’s more important to seem like an interesting person on the internet than it is to actually be an interesting person in reality. People define themselves and their passions as “football” or “watching Netflix” or “shopping.” They can’t understand what it is to be curious about or interested in something other than their social circle or what is happening on Snapchat.
Being curious is different than being passionate. Being curious is wanting to learn about calligraphy in your spare time or seeing something pop up in one of your American Lit textbooks and googling what Sylvia Plath really meant in that line of poetry about her “Taroc” pack. Being curious is seeing little things occur in your everyday life and questioning them. Being curious is dabbling in random information here and there and being hopeful that, although you don’t like math at all, there might be something you can learn from that math program you use in your math modeling class. It’s being aware that there is something you can learn from everything and everyone.
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a local speaker series. Alan Alda, a famous actor, who is also highly involved in the scientific community, was answering questions onstage submitted by audience members. One of the questions was, “What are you curious about?” He smiled and began to talk about certain micro bacteria that live on your body. He explained how the bacteria that live on your hand are different from the bacteria that live on his hand, and so on. The audience was silent. He talked about these bacteria intensely. When he was finished, he grinned widely, and said to the silence: “Isn’t that just the coolest thing you’ve ever heard?!”
The curiosity that Alan Alda has is the curiosity that all people are born with. Unfortunately, technology has numbed the sense of curiosity in many people, especially this generation. You have the power to become an interesting person: a person who takes in everything life has to offer and grows with knowledge beyond the realm of digital screens and social media profiles. Take the time to ask yourself, “What am I curious about?” and I guarantee you, your world will flourish.
