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timujin comments on Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015 - Less Wrong
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I've lost my curiosity. I have noticed that over the course of the last year, I have become significantly less curious. I no longer feel the need to know anything unless I need it, I don't understand how it is possible to desire knowledge for the sake of knowledge (even though the past me definitely did), I generally find myself unable to empathize with knowledge-seekers and the virtue of curiosity. That worries me a lot, because if you asked me two years earlier, I would have named curiosity as my main characteristic and the desire for knowledge my main driving force. Thinking over the last year, I can't remember any life-changing experiences that would have warranted the change. May it have been the foods I ate, or some neurological damage? I would have attributed it to brain aging, if I weren't twenty. What happened? How to reverse it? I find it crippling.
Listen to yourself. You want to know what happened to you. You're still a curious person.
Even if you don't feel like you want to learn in general, you want to want to learn. You're on the path to switching from undirected to directed, from chaotic to purposeful curiosity. You already know how to pursue a question; now you need to find what questions matter to you.
The source of my wanting is conscience rather than passion, though. It's a completely different thing, and learning is a tiring activity which importance I realize, rather than something that empowers me or something I look forward to. That's the problem.
You could be depressed.
I don't feel depressed at all. In the contrary, I am quite motivated, agitated and sort of happy.
I've felt that lack of curiosity a fair amount over the past 5-10 years. I suspect the biggest change that reduced my curiosity was becoming financially secure. Or maybe some other changes which made me feel more secure.
I doubt that I ever sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge, even when it felt like I was doing that. It seems more plausible that I had hidden motives such as the desire to impress people with the breadth or sophistication of my knowledge.
LessWrong attitudes toward politics may have reduced some aspects of my curiosity by making it clear that my curiosity in many areas had been motivated by a desire to signal tribal membership. That hasn't enabled me to redirect curiosity toward more productive areas, but I'm probably better off without those aspects of curiosity.
I am definitely not better off without what I lost. Genuine curiosity had tremendously powerful effect on my learning.
consider: exploration/exploitation. Maybe some part of you has decided that it's time to stop exploring education and its time to exploit the knowledge you already have? Do you feel like you have a lot of knowledge now? Or that you know enough? Is your relationship to knowledge seeking now in the form of "disinterest", "too busy for it", "sick of it" or some other sentiment...
(also as Artaxerxes said - depression, or other brain chemical things that this could be a symptom of)
In our college, students of the first four years were rumoured to be going through the exploration phase, and then - satiety and exploitation. It certainly felt that way to me, and anecdotally a person a year younger, but of course it might be just because of specific curriculum structure. (I am a botanist.)
No, I definitely didn't learn everything I think I need. I am very much in need to learn a lot of things, desperately, in fact.
I still pursue knowledge from pragmatic standpoint. "This is useful, this is not, therefore I need to learn this and can completely disregard that". There is just no "drive" in it, no genuine force of curiosity that used to be so motivating. From pragmatic standpoint, my ability to learn suffered a great hit.
Have you tried to look at any new areas recently? Perhaps you are getting kind of "bored" by the repetition.
Sort of yes. Maybe not sufficiently new. I shall look into it.
I had to consciously make myself read articles on the topic of my PhD topic (and not unrelated stuff, so much more interesting), so you just might be lucky! Or even if you don't think so, you can use this property, at least.