💖 Curiosity Rewards Always

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The Many Rewards of Curiosity

While chatting with a friend a few weeks ago, we were discussing token incentives for memecoins. I made an offhand comment about curiosity with the phrase “curiosity rewards always,” which I’d noted here in a previous issue for those eagle-eyed readers and was asked to dig into this a bit more.

Since then, I’ve begun to explore my own relationship with curiosity through the lens of how these mechanisms could potentially benefit various onchain communities and the artists inhabiting them. Particularly, as it relates to how we, and I, see this evolution of wonder expanding as we intersect with increasingly intelligent artificial beings.

Beyond this fascination with curiosity, I also wanted to discover the connection to this ever-present hunger for learning and the often unseen consequences of overcoming the looming sense of overwhelm.

My Relationship With Curiosity

I’m incredibly thankful to be a Millennial for the simple fact I remember a childhood filled with curiosity before the internet really took off.

It wasn’t but around 5 years after I was born that AOL trial discs landed in hundreds of thousands of mailboxes across the country. Before the internet finally hit my household, my primary modes of curious entertainment were playing aimlessly outside, reading Chicken Soup for the Soul books, or episodes of Wishbone, Mr. Rogers, and The Magic School Bus on PBS.

For me, harnessing boredom by channeling it into curious thinking and observation has led to an immense amount of self-learning.

At the same time, I’ve noticed many of us have sort of lost our ability to cultivate this curious nature as we cater to god-like algorithms and increasingly shortened memetic cycles.

This is in no small part due to the lobotomizing effects of late-stage social networks with their mind-numbing media and the unthinking nature of grotesquely boring content streamed directly into our brains.

Actually, it is this adoration of learning and exploration that I offer self-love and service through curiosity. I realize that not everyone is filled with this extremely curious nature, this yearning for learning, if you will.

How do we possibly adapt to an internet fraught with playing into an attention-based economy that desires virality, one that requires an insatiable hunger for celebrity as sustenance?

We rebel through softness, service, love, care for our fellow web dwellers.

Gathering Information, Noticing Patterns, Pondering

In order to effectively gather information, one must adapt several filters in the mind with which all input gets sifted through, like a baker’s flour ready for a new batch of cookies. This prevents impurities in the thought process and helps us fight the urge to run to the next shiny object.

It’s one thing to casually tinker with the idea of exploring one’s own curious nature, but when things begin to tip into full-time, always-on exploration, it can become quite dangerous for those mind filters.

The term “mind palace,” if you’ve heard of it, comes into play here as well. It isn’t only used for memory, a la Sherlock Holmes, though that is certainly one way to use it. Often, it’s a place of retreat, a place where I go to sit in contemplation. It’s how I can gather tons and tons of data every day and still recall with accuracy when the tiniest bit warrants sharing. Tending to this mind palace so it doesn’t decay, crumble, and rot away is critical for curiosity to flourish.

As I regularly sit to ponder on the information I’ve gathered, an incredibly important step in this venture is a meditative process cycling between:

3-4 hours of focused hunting + gathering

Followed by a long walk or nap

Writing about said learnings in a stream-of-consciousness

The key piece here is not to overcomplicate it or overwork the brain to total exhaustion. It’s an exercise in curiosity, not a sprint to genius.

If you’ve ever experienced burnout, you’ll have likely searched how to avoid it to find that there are 7 types of rest to employ: physical, mental, emotional, creative, social, spiritual, and sensory. And yes, we should all integrate these practices into our routine when forming habits of curiosity.

Often, these memetic cycles we are forever entwined divert our attention towards side-quests that are wholly unintuitive or separate from our need for consistency, resulting in a more frequent feeling of burnout and less desire for contemplative curiosity.

This is where both the joy of missing out and solitude come into play in our practice of pondering.

However, I would also recommend learning which type of curious person you are most often and realizing when you are flowing from one type to another. According to twin researchers Perry Zurn and Dani S Bassett, there are three types of curious people: busybody, hunter, and dancer. In their co-authored book Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, they examine the sociological and philosophical nature of curiosity and describe each of these types as such.

The Busybody makes it their business to know anything and everything, fluttering around from topic to topic like a butterfly.

The Hunter is focused on the hunt, tracking down new discoveries as if sniffing out the landscape for the bits of info leading to a catch.

The Dancer relies on imagination leaping through learning gracefully on the dance floor atop beds of information.

Over time, when practicing your own connection to curiosity, you may find new archetypes yet undiscovered by Zurn and Bassett’s modern philosophy of curiosity, but these three are an excellent start.

Where and How To Be Rewarded for Curiosity

Of course, we want to stave off those moments of looking over the social media cliff into the abyss. We’re not necessarily talking about growth or volume here, more a balance between sanity and curiosity.

It’s not altogether incorrect to think of the web as your personal Museum Wormanium, or a collection of eclectic curiosities. The cabinet of curiosities from the Danish collector dubbed “Ol Worm” by friends and patrons has transformed in the present day as the digital wallet where collections of art, memes, and memecoins live on as a new, more refined iteration of the attention economy as posed by Li Jin of Variant Fund this past week.

Wallet builders like Surreal, Interface, and Zerion are the new facilitators of curiosity when crafting these new eclectic interfaces with which to view collections of memecoins and curated, community-led art that aids in a sort of “hive curiosity”. This is evidenced by the current round of memecoins on Base like $CRASH and $HIGHER, where artists and holders are rewarded for creating and collecting memes. And especially so for $DEGEN, where the meta on Farcaster is helping to facilitate tipping genuine engagement with users.

This transfer of attention and legacy extractive models from the individual to distributed groups pushes value across an entire holder base. These dynamic interfaces for value transfer will continue to reward our relationship with curiosity and attention as even more novel economies emerge.

One can imagine curiosity isn't so difficult to cultivate once the right paths to explore and circles to tend to.

So where do I specifically hunt and gather for new internet curiosities these days? It’s simple, really: about 10 different active Telegram groups, 1 or 2 Discord servers (lurking in dozens more), Farcaster channels, YouTube channels (that you get a peek at in these newsletters), and IG, where I mostly post Stories.

Now, for extra curiosity credit, you’ll want to ignore these text-based and overrun media-fueled networks altogether and seek out wonder in the world around you. This might be difficult at first, but hey, a little practice never hurt anyone.

Balance and moderation in all things.

A contemplative walk alone with soft lofi beats, no reading, and no work pings helps to truly tune in to all those swirling thoughts. Communing with the divine nature in each step helps to calm the nervous system and soothe the soul in preparation for deeper, more analytical thinking.

Noticing the patterns inside one’s self often is the reward.

I fully believe that humanity's next complete evolution will come from a collective awakening inside us all as we further merge with these digital spaces. That might sound both esoteric and a little frightening, and it very well may be for many. However, we’ll almost certainly soon have more time and energy to devote to self-integration, interreflection, and attunement to self.

This is what we need more of, to seek not just the echo chambers of social networks that have become more media than they are social, but to truly build bonds, to build town cares rather than only town squares.

Where we currently operate in this space under the assumption of the same Web2-style marketing funnels and these frankly disconnected, delusional notions of connection, there is still room to grow. We can and should create room for more whole spaces for care beyond fetishistic financialization and cultish brand design.

How do we do that, you ask? Through intentional worldbuilding, of course. Lore (but crispy h/t @deana)

In a future issue, we’ll cover both co-worldbuilding and how lore plays into our collective curiosity as participants in emerging economies.

Until then, stay curious!

Hunting and Gathering 🔗 

Watch This

• Movie monologues that changed my whole worldview, by Like Stories of Old - for those of you thinking about narratives & lore

Read This

• What if tech was soft? from Burn After Reading, the MØRNING newsletter

• Left-Curving DAOs by LGHT, capturing the intersection of memecoins and DAOs