Especially at paradigm-fracturing moments when it feels like the ground is shifting, the world has changed, and our previously stable grip on “the way of things” has softened, it’s important to focus on exploration, understanding, and interest.

As technologies, cultural norms, economic systems, and the myriad impacts of these larger forces on our day-to-day begin to disrupt our momentary rhythms and future plans, there’s an understandable tendency to ignore, deny, or push back against these forces; not because we think it’s possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but because accepting the new reality they’ve instigated is more than we can currently handle.

At such moments, it can be helpful to reorient away from knee-jerk (if perhaps justified) disavowal and denegation, and instead aim for a humble sort of curiosity.

Not approval, not acceptance: a genuine interest in the spiraling variables triggering the tumult.

This alternative perspective allows us to see the things (even those that unnerve us) more clearly, and it pushes us to understand these forces more completely. As we come to better grok these perturbations, we may find there are facets of them we appreciate and perhaps even celebrate. We might also find they are even more poisonous than we assumed, but because we’ve taken the time to more fully understand them, we also have a better sense of how to combat and counter them.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, a considerate, deliberate, open stance will almost always be the ideal response to reflexive defensiveness in the face of novelty.

Curiosity nudges us away from easy bias toward hard-earned knowledge and, counterintuitively, maintaining our inquisitiveness through turbulent times is one of the more intellectually and emotionally sustaining things we can do at such moments.

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