Permission to Wonder

When did curiosity start needing an alibi?

“I know this is completely useless, but…”

It’s a weird way to start a conversation.

Before we’ve even shared whatever weird or wonderful thing has captured our attention, we’ve already described it as useless. We haven’t even decided if the information is interesting, entertaining, or worth knowing. We’ve simply announced that it has no practical value, almost as though we need to explain why we found it interesting in the first place.

There are variations, of course. “This is probably really random, but…” “I went down the weirdest rabbit hole today.” “Don’t ask me why I know this, but…”

Sometimes these are just conversational habits, little jokes, or ways of introducing a new topic. But sometimes there seems to be something else underneath, like an awareness that we’ve devoted our attention to something we can’t quite justify.

Which raises an interesting question for me: When did our curiosity start needing an alibi?

I’ve often thought that adults have lost their sense of wonder. That somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we become too practical, too busy, or too preoccupied with life’s responsibilities to remain genuinely curious about the world.

It’s an appealing explanation, right? Particularly when you think about nostalgic images of childhood: kids examining insects, asking endless questions about the moon, or wondering why the sky is blue and the grass is green.

But I’m not really convinced that’s true. Especially after something that happened recently.

Fat Bear Week.

Every fall, Katmai National Park in Alaska invites the public to vote for the brown bears that have gotten the fattest in preparation for hibernation. There are pictures, tournament brackets, bear histories, and people who have learned to distinguish individual bears by the color of their ears or the shape of their noses.

We follow family rivalries, remember former champions, and definitely develop favorites—shout-out to Bucky. We become surprisingly invested in which of these already enormous animals has gotten the fattest.

It is totally, completely, and gloriously unnecessary.

And yet people participate with incredible enthusiasm. This year, Fat Bear Week seemed to explode on social media. I couldn’t scroll through TikTok for two minutes without encountering another video about bears.

Some people watched the live cameras and discovered that these animals have distinct histories and recognizable habits, like Bucky sitting beneath a waterfall, letting fish practically drop onto his face. Others arrived after seeing a picture, hearing a joke, or listening to a friend who insisted they absolutely had to see this.

A quick glance might become a question. “Wait, what do you mean he eats seagulls?” And that question leads to another, until someone who previously thought bears were just cool animals suddenly knows an astonishing amount about them.

Or at least knows more than they ever expected to, thanks to someone else’s daily updates about the tournament brackets.

Shout-out to my husband.

But nobody actually needed this information, right?

That hardly seemed to matter.

Fat Bear Week doesn’t prove that every adult is curious about everything, but it’s a pretty spectacular reminder that we haven’t lost our capacity for fascination.

So maybe the more interesting question isn’t why adults have stopped wondering. It’s why we sometimes feel the need to explain ourselves when we do.

Why do we care if people think we care about something?

Sometimes we don’t have to explain our curiosity at all. There’s already a perfectly good reason for it.

Researching a destination before a vacation? That’s sensible. You need to prepare. Learning about a historical period for a class? That’s education.

Investigating a problem at work? Well, that’s productive. Reading about gardening techniques? That might improve the garden.

In each case, there’s a reason for learning something beyond being interested in it.

But what if we investigate the same destination without ever planning to go there? What if we read about that historical period because something in it caught our attention? Hello, Henry VIII and his six wives.

What if we spent an afternoon trying to understand how something works, even if we have no intention of ever using that knowledge?

The activity hasn’t really changed. We’re still learning. But the distinction lies in whether we can point to a practical reason for doing it.

And I catch myself doing this, too.

I can spend hours following an unexpected question and enjoy every minute of it, but I still get that uncomfortable thought that I should be doing something better with my time. Something more productive, something that has value, so to speak.

And sometimes I really should be doing something else. Responsibilities don’t just disappear because I’ve discovered something interesting, a mystery, or an unusually entertaining bear. Curiosity can become procrastination as easily as anything else, especially for me.

But the feeling doesn’t always depend on neglecting my responsibilities. Sometimes there’s nothing particularly urgent waiting for me, and I still find myself mentally accounting for the time.

Why am I doing that? What exactly am I accounting for?

We seem to have developed acceptable categories for our leisure time. Gardening can be productive, restorative, and beautiful. Reading can be enriching, and watching a film is recognizable entertainment. Hobbies offer a familiar explanation for spending time doing something simply because we enjoy it.

But an unexpected intellectual detour is harder to categorize.

It might produce no finished object, solve no problems, and contribute absolutely nothing to our future plans. We might finish knowing more than we did before, but without any particular use for what we’ve learned.

Maybe that’s why it’s sometimes hard to explain an unexpected rabbit hole. It doesn’t always announce where it’s going, much less what it intends to accomplish when it gets there.

There’s a difference between feeling like I need to justify my curiosity to myself and feeling like I need to justify it to someone else. But perhaps they’re connected. In both cases, I’m wondering whether something that interests me is worth the time or attention I’m giving it.

But what happens when we want to share that fascination with someone else?

A new discovery can create an almost irresistible urge to tell somebody. We want to point toward the thing we found and say, “Look at this thing!”

Sometimes the other person leans in, asks a question, and joins the conversation. The conversation becomes something neither person could have created alone. They say, “Oh, wow, that’s so cool!” or “OMG!” And they have questions.

But other times, the subject totally and completely fails to catch their attention.

They might be distracted, overwhelmed by our enthusiasm, or simply uninterested in the subject. That doesn’t mean our curiosity was inappropriate. Not everything that fascinates us is going to fascinate everyone else.

Still, sharing enthusiasm involves a small vulnerability on our part. We’re offering another person something that delighted us without knowing if they’ll find it delightful too.

Giving them a little piece of us. A little insight into our minds, our hearts, or maybe even our souls.

And maybe that’s where those disclaimers come from. They acknowledge that uncertainty.

“I know this is random” may mean nothing more than “I realize this isn’t what we’re talking about.”

“Nobody else probably cares about this” might be a joke, but it also might be a protective gesture or an invitation for someone to prove us wrong.

Maybe they’re just scared to share.

Either way, I find the language interesting.

We often introduce our discoveries by explaining why they’re odd, irrelevant, excessive, or even unnecessary. We sometimes seem more comfortable presenting our curiosity as an accident rather than admitting we pursued something deliberately just because we found it interesting.

And perhaps that brings us back to Fat Bear Week.

One of the remarkable things about a shared fascination is that nobody has to explain why they’re interested. Someone else already pointed at it, a community gathered, and the invitation is already waiting.

There’s something kind of liberating about discovering that thousands of other people are also interested in the thing that caught your attention.

You can discuss the bears’ fishing techniques, learn their histories, and spend an unreasonable amount of time watching a river in Alaska without having to explain why any of this deserves your attention.

The fascination has somewhere to go.

But collective enthusiasm isn’t the only legitimate kind. Surely an obscure question doesn’t become more worthy of investigation just because enough people happen to ask it at once.

Or does the presence of other interested people change something important? Not the value of the subject, but our willingness to admit that we care about it.

I don’t know that the answer is the same for everyone.

Some people pursue their interests quite happily without an audience or an explanation. Others are perfectly comfortable with curiosity but less comfortable taking up conversational space. Others may struggle to enjoy an activity that doesn’t appear to accomplish anything productive.

And sometimes the familiar disclaimer might be nothing more than a harmless figure of speech.

But I keep returning to that opening sentence:

“I know this is completely useless, but…”

That’s just an extraordinary thing to say before sharing something that we found worth knowing.

It assumes, even casually, that usefulness is a relevant measure of whether something deserves our attention. It introduces the possibility that our fascination requires an explanation, even if no one ever asks for one.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether adults have permission to wonder. Clearly, we wonder anyway.

We wonder why people can’t drive in traffic. We wonder about fat bears. We wonder who’s going to win on Dancing with the Stars.

Perhaps the question is why we sometimes feel like we have to account for our wondering.

And I wonder what would happen if every once in a while we skipped the disclaimer.

If we simply said:

“Hey, look what I found.”

Photo by Carla Martinesi on Unsplash.