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polymathwannabe 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.