I sleep badly lately. You know, those nights where you hover between fatigue and extreme sharpness. Where the analytic dream dissects reality like a relentless scalpel. There’s a slow-motion car crash happening, razor-sharp in my mind… and – noblesse oblige – most people don’t even see it.
Not the economy. Not the climate. Not cities in flames nor baby-brained politicians in MCU-worthy tantrums. Not the latest outrage porn playing on loop in our collective Chinese doomscroll. No, this one is quieter, deadlier, and far more insidious. It’s the extinction of curiosity. The deliberate lobotomization of thought. The willing exchange of deep thinking for dopamine hits. The collective decision to stop asking, stop wondering, stop pushing beyond what is spoon-fed to us in 15-second intervals. We have mistaken convenience for wisdom, repetition for understanding, virality for truth. And we are paying the price.
I’m a broad-range strategist. My passion (and my job) is to ask why. To question everything. To make people and businesses uncomfortable, to peel back the skin of a problem and poke at the exposed nerves underneath. But more and more, I see a world that just wants to coast. That wants answers but never wants to ask the best questions. That prefers the safety of certainty over the jagged beauty of exploration. Here’s the kicker: we’re not even answering the right things. Not for ourselves. Not for our clients. Not for our civilization. Instead, we obsess over the trivial, amplify the meaningless, and automate the essential. We streamline, optimize, and polish systems that should have been torn apart and rebuilt from scratch. We mistake efficiency for intelligence.
I see grown-up business owners reading three headlines on a populist news site, watching a 12-second out-of-context quote on TikTok, parroting an empty slogan from a self-proclaimed guru or politician on TV, and mixing it into a toxic, brain-killing cocktail. Fuck science. Why bother with critical thinking? Why fact-check? Why activate the laser-destructive power of curiosity on steroids and fusion energy? They don’t. People don’t bother.
This should terrify you. It certainly freaks me out.
Curiosity is what built this civilization. It is what is going to build the next. It’s what domesticated fire, split the atom, and put footprints on the moon. It’s what made us look at gravity through the lens of an apple, at electricity, at a hunk of metal and say, “I bet I can make this do something interesting.” It’s what makes a child take apart a toy just to see what’s inside. It’s the relentless engine of progress, the heartbeat of innovation, the only thing standing between us and stagnation.
And yet here we are. I see more and more people, in the golden age of information, actively choosing ignorance. Skimming instead of reading. Repeating instead of thinking. Getting our truths pre-packaged, shrink-wrapped, and algorithmically curated for maximum comfort. Sucking at the willing nipple of populism, racism, negationism, conspiracy theories, and extreme right and left pre-chewed nonsense. Mistaking a well-phrased tweet for knowledge, a viral soundbite for an opinion, a clumsy sniper’s shot through a candidate’s ear as a manifestation of the will of a white supremacist god with a vengeance and no timer for Black History Month.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the shadows, the Illuminati supposedly pull the strings, orchestrating world events from their candle-lit dungeons while the Deep State ensures we all stay obedient little sheep. The lizard people? Oh, they’re here too—hiding in plain sight, sipping adrenochrome cocktails while flat-earthers pontificate about the giant ice wall guarded by armed penguins with a deep commitment to secrecy. Don’t forget the orange presidents, promising salvation while drowning in self-importance, buoyed not by competence but by sheer audacity. Buoyancy, in fact, seems to be the only scientific concept some people still acknowledge, provided it doesn’t contradict their grand delusions.
We’ve reached a point where logic is the enemy, where intellectual rigor is discarded in favor of entertaining nonsense, and where believing the most ridiculous thing possible is somehow a form of rebellion. Critical thinking has been swapped for cult-like devotion to narratives so absurd they wouldn’t make the cut for a third-rate sci-fi script.
It’s not just lazy. It’s bloody dangerous.
A world without curiosity is a world of automatons. Of brainless yes-sayers. Of people who never ask if something could be different, better, or torn down entirely to build something new. A world where questioning is replaced with consuming, where debate is swapped for outrage, where the spectrum of thought is flattened into binary choices: Left or right. Good or evil. Us or them. Where the only thing that matters is engagement, where the only currency is attention, where the only measure of worth is how quickly you can be processed and forgotten.
We used to build things. Hack things. Break things just to see if we could make them better. Now? We optimize. We tweak. We polish the existing system without ever asking if the system itself is worth a damn.
It’s difficult to find the rebels; but you see cogs-a-plenty. People who refine, who adapt, who fit neatly into the puzzle without ever questioning whether the puzzle itself is worth solving, and if there should be a puzzle in the first place.
Politicians thrive on this. They don’t want an engaged, questioning electorate. They want parrots. People who regurgitate pre-approved narratives, who never ask if the entire structure is built on sand, who see their side as infallible and the other as irredeemable. In some corporations, sadly, it’s no better.
And the cost?
The cost is everything.
Without curiosity, there is no progress. No new ideas. No breakthroughs. Just the same tired patterns, repeated until the end of time, like a civilization on loop, too distracted to notice it has stopped moving. When curiosity dies, burnout follows. And when our collective mental lazy fatigue reaches its peak, we won’t collapse in a fiery spectacle—we will wither into a slow, miserable decline. A civilization euthanized by apathy, one 15-second movie at a time.
So what’s the fix?
Burn the script. Smash the algorithm. Read things that piss you off. Talk to people who challenge you. Not to own them, not to prove them wrong, but to understand. Ask stupid questions, because the best ideas often start with, “What if …?”
Curiosity is a muscle. Use it or lose it.
Because once it’s gone, once we’ve all been lulled into the comfort of passive consumption, of regurgitated beliefs, of never asking “what if?” — we won’t even notice what we’ve lost, or why we’re losing.
And that, more than anything, should scare the hell out of you. (It keeps me awake for sure.)
