We Need a Culture of Curiosity

We live in an incredible world. 

We live on a planet teeming with millions of forms of life, covered with beautiful landscapes and filled to the brim with experiences and sensations to literally last a lifetime. 

That would be awesome enough by itself.

But the really amazing thing is the fact we've had the tremendous fortune to be alive NOW. 

We live in an age where we know our place in the universe. An age where we know what lies across the unthinkable distances of space. An age where we know the four billion years of history that came before us on this world. An age where we can speak to anyone, anywhere in the world. An age where we can fly across the world at 550mph when, a few hundred years ago, you would've been lucky to even leave your local town.

And yet, in this age of wonders, we find ourselves in a society that belittles curiosity. A society that values interest in mundanity over interest in the incredible world around us.

Our society trains and teaches us to distract ourselves with every meaningless diversion from reality TV to cat memes. People devote their every waking thought to who will win The X Factor or the Premiere League, when there's an entire universe of unbelievable richness and variety just outside their frame of view.

Humans live very short lives. We have an extremely limited window in which to see this universe, and seeing and experiencing it can realistically be the only purpose to our existing within it. 

So many people miss out on that chance to experience reality because of the anti-curiosity, anti-science, anti-intelligent culture we've developed. 

Now that the internet has made it possible for people to bypass the established channels of communication and has opened up access to information to everybody, now is the perfect time to set about creating a societal shift towards a new focus on curiosity. 

It's time to start engineering a society that rewards intelligent pursuits. A society that encourages young people to get out into the real world around them instead of living in a closed sphere of distracting minutiae. 

You can never force people to make this kind of change, and that should never be the goal. What we can do is get the message out there that a life of curiosity and endeavour is by far more rewarding than the way most people live at present. 

Let's let today's young people know that a better option exists. 

It's the only way our future will ever be one worth living for.