Contentment of Curiosity
In a world focusing so hard on empowerment and confidence, I'm truly pushing for something different. It's great if you're confident and empowered but it doesn't provide direction whatsoever. Contentment is also a great thing but ignorance is bliss and as such, contentment can be a dangerous focus in itself. It's too passive to stand alone as a driving force. I strive to instill inspiration for contentment of curiosity; an active positive skepticism. Life is going to be full of imperfections and we're always going to be imperfect. Focusing on becoming a confident, empowered, and content imperfect person leaves out a critical part of the puzzle, curiosity.
Curiosity in itself is not even enough direction for us to base our lives around. I feel we need contentment closely paired with curiosity so that we are inquisitive as to why we are content, why we are seeking contentment, and why we are curious in the first place. It's a really beautiful thing to be content with your imperfect self. That's doing the best they can, but at the same time it's a double-edged sword that invites complacency. Self-acceptance is not necessarily self-improvement. Contentment should be directed more towards being at peace with your process of growth rather than satisfied with the results. We need to be curiously striving to better ourselves consciously. That involves instilling a rather oddball almost paradoxical feeling of being happy with being wrong. Taking that and running with it, being content and curious with finding out your own weaknesses. Weaknesses in your patterns of behavior, with your mindset, with your interactions with the world, and most importantly, with your beliefs that underlie all of these things.
To see how this feels in the heat of the moment, let's apply a friction point. Picture this: you get offended. It happens all the time. Someone says something, you see something controversial, somebody cuts you off in traffic. Except this time you observe the event happening from a place of contentment of curiosity. Instead of looking at the observation that you've witnessed as a formula, you look at it as multiple questions. Why is this occurring? Why am I feeling offended or triggered by it? What are the underlying implications? What are the environmental factors that have influenced this to happen? Now instead of seeing something and being reactive to it, you're exercising your free will and looking deeper to give yourself a more well-rounded perspective. This gets you out of a reactive mindset and puts you in the role of the content and curious observer.
In the state of friction, the question arises, what now? What decision do I make? Within the contentment of curiosity we must ask: Why does a decision need to be made at all? While a decision can be made, but it doesn't always need to be made. We may feel drawn to “solve” the problem in the moment or “fix” the offense, but the main goal is the observation itself. Learning to understand with greater depth isn't an action to do, it's the destination we journey towards. By choosing to follow the questions it shifts us from a transactional mindset to an existential one, where the search for truth is the highest endeavor.
Not only does this ease the blow to your self-importance, with habituation of this practice you'll begin to hone your self-importance on a regular basis. It doesn't truly matter that you've been offended by it. It matters that you learn and grow from it; that you learn to understand and gain knowledge from the occurrence that you observe.
Integrating this into social dynamics opens more opportunity for empathy and intellectual humility. You're not just helping your own frame of mind, you're allowing others more freedom of expression without becoming reactive or stepping into their framework.
One of the most powerful pieces of knowledge that you can use with this is good old Socrates’ concept of knowing that you know nothing. If we're content with knowing nothing then we're more than happy to be curious and to learn. When embody knowing nothing, we have nowhere to base our judgements and biases to create a negative situation. True empowerment isn't having confidence in your current perspective but having the contentment to continue openly searching for answers.
