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Leaden Incurious

Reading the Carl Sagan quote in this article almost made me tear up because its so true and sad. He said this way before we had the tablets and video games stepping in as nannies for young kids because the adult caregivers in their lives have no capacity to do better than that. 

“My experience is, you go talk to kindergarten kids or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. And they ask deep questions. ‘What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?’ These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th grade students and there’s none of that. They’ve become leaden and incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade and it’s not just puberty.”

Year after year, the workforce draws from the vast ranks of these "leaden and incurious" adults we raise as a society. That lack of curiosity and inability to ponder deep questions leads to bad outcomes for enterprises of all kinds. Work  becomes about going through a new set of motions without the desire to do wonderful, amazing and novel things. 

Anyone who tries to do something different, challenge the status quo is met with a lot of inertia and resistance. This would be the kind of person who refused to let go of their kindergarten-era curiosity and does not fit in with their generation. It is no surprise that you run into very few of this type, much less often you see them be able to break the resistance barrier and do good in the world.

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