HUNTER: Curiosity’s Cat

Curiosity. What is it? I’m curious to know. It’s that feeling we all get when we see something new, something unknown, something that can be investigated further. We get a sort of urge to find out more about whatever piques our interest in a futile attempt to quench that insatiable thirst for knowledge. There’s too much of everything for one person to know everything, so why do we bother? Who knows? People are silly. Even if that doesn’t quite satisfy my curiosity, it’ll do.

Though we all have this feeling to some extent, some of us are more curious than others. Some might see the unknown as uninteresting or not worth the effort to investigate, while others might see it as a potential adventure or a chance to gain more knowledge.

Curiosity, be it what it may, is a basic and essential part of our childhood. Without curiosity, a toddler wouldn’t be trying to ingest everything in sight. Then there’s that stage at around five years old where the child enters the incredibly annoying “Why? Why? But why?!” stage. Curiosity is to blame for all of that.

But all that means curiosity is a good thing, isn’t it? It helps us discover new things and find out more about the world and the people around us. We feel compelled to interact with our environment in as many different, original ways as possible, we catalogue the responses, and we learn from them. Curiosity makes us inquisitive and eventually innovative in our approaches.

But is curiosity really always that good for us?

Well, first of all, curiosity makes us very nosy by nature. Take, for instance, those frequent times in public transportation when we’re forced to reluctantly shrink our personal bubbles for the sake of sharing a seat with someone. If this person, this stranger who we know nothing about, is holding some sort of text, we suddenly feel a force, one which I’d attribute to this insatiable curiosity of ours, that causes us to look over their shoulder. It’s especially tempting when the text in question is found within a brightly lit BlackBerry or iPhone. Who is that person talking to? What is that person reading? Why should we care? Curiosity is our excuse.

Then there’s another problem with curiosity – it kills cats. That’s right.

Of course, I’m thinking of the popular saying, ‘curiosity killed the cat.’ To some extent it does makes sense. Cat or not, any individual that feels curiosity take over is putting himself in risk of plenty of unknown dangers. The aforementioned toddler, for instance, risks all sorts of nasty infections when ingesting all those foreign items. The five-year old risks a scolding from an annoyed parent. Even we, curious passengers using the public transport, risk ending up on the receiving end of a potentially very nasty glare.

Curiosity killed the cat. Or did it? I suppose we’re looking at Schrodinger’s cat if we can’t decide whether curiosity killed the cat or allowed it to become more successful. Ah, that just reminds me that my curiosity for the fate of that one special, theoretical cat will never be satisfied. How frustrating.

I’m curious to know what you think of curiosity, but I’m curious about many things. Good thing I’m not a cat.