The other day, I came up with a random question while reading an article about mountaineering in Nepal:
“How is it like to climb up Mt. Everest?”
Just a few days before that, I was on a flight that experienced multiple mild turbulence. That got me thinking:
“What causes plane turbulence?”
As a kid, I daydreamed about these kinds of questions all day long. Many times, I pestered my dad who would feed my curiosity with just the right answers.
But now as a grown-ass man, I think I have lost my sense of wonderment. For one, I don’t wonder as much as I used to about my past self. Secondly, and most importantly, I don’t think one step further than the question that pops up in my head.
My brain’s default response to most of my unexpected reveries is to Googleit, as if I have outsourced my thinking capacity to Google.
This has started to worry me a lot because I believe it’s very important to retain that child-like curiosity about the world around us. Yes, it’s great to have accurate answers to all your wonders, but not by being spoon-fed. I think we should scratch our own itch as much as possible—before we ask for help.
Google has made a lot of things easier for us, it’s the biggest ever library that’s out there. But I think it has also jammed our thinking capacities.
It has certainly made me lazy. We humans have always been historically lazy in our thinking and decision-making. With the rise in smart alec, mind-reading AIs who understand you before you finish a query, I wonder what’s going to happen with us in the future.
Maybe I should look that up in Google too. 🤔
Thinking is difficult and sometimes unpleasant.