As an adult, I don’t often find myself getting hung up on topics of interest. Interests arise, but burnout and mental fatigue prevent me from taking the dive. I suspect that there are many who feel the same, but don’t know how to identify the problem, let alone solve it. The Monthly Hangup is an attempt to tackle this all-too-common issue.
It’s difficult to be curious, let alone passionate, when you’re out of practice. Merriam-Webster defines a hang up like so: “to become stuck or snagged so as to be immovable”. Despite the implications of being motionless, it’s actually an intransitive verb — meaning that the verb requires only yourself, no outside object.
hang up
intransitive verb
: to become stuck or snagged so as to be immovable
Truly, to be hung up on something is to be engaging with something, so much so that your resolve is immovable. How can we learn to be so passionate? How can we learn to re-engage so fiercely with knowledge, the world, and ourselves?
What We Forgot About Being Children
When your life is work, or school, or any other set of daily responsibilities, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the concept of setting up the perfect conditions for curiosity. Where do I even begin? What time do I need to carve out to be curious? What questions do I have to ask?
I suppose that’s just the problem — when I was fifteen years old, I went down an internet rabbit hole learning about the United States prison system. When I was twelve, I watched countless hours of media describing lore to video games I didn’t even own. When I was nine, I made my own book about dragons after reading several at the library and deciding I could do it better.
How can we learn to be so passionate? How can we learn to re-engage so fiercely with knowledge, the world, and ourselves?
None of these topics were handed to me, and there was no syllabus or performance review to inform how I explored them. I simply stumbled upon a thread of interest — something I didn’t know — and followed it through a tangled mess of unknowns until I had (semi-neatly) arranged the threads into something I could digest. These were acts of pure, uninterrupted curiosity, passion, and creativity.
One of the best (albeit scariest, too) parts of being a child is knowing nothing. It forces us to learn, and it’s one of the things we forget as we grow older. As we gain more knowledge, we tend to fall into an illusion of having little else to learn. It’s like saying that since you’ve walked so many miles in your lifetime, there’s few reasons to walk any more.
The good news for curiosity as an adult is that, no matter how much you know, hardly anything makes sense. Credit scores, economics, traffic jams, inflation — hell, even random muscle pains — all come with a well of information available to explore. Maybe none of these boring adult things interest you, and that’s okay. But the world, once engaged with, will have no shortage of questions to present you with. History, art, fantasy, literature: if you ever find yourself wondering how something came to be, or how it works, or what’s going to happen with it next, pick up the thread and start walking. You might be surprised at where it leads you, and what you can learn about yourself in the process.
Curiosity As Self Care
Building the habit of curiosity can certainly sound like giving yourself more work to do; and it is work, but only until it isn’t.
If we can reframe curiosity in our lives as an aspect of self-care, a part of our daily routine akin to taking a shower or eating a meal, the reflex will grow stronger. Reallocating time we set aside for doomscrolling or lamenting about our boredom to intentional, proactive learning can make us more resilient, more satisfied, and more aware in our day-to-day lives. It can literally make you healthier as you grow older.
Get Hung Up
There is less and less incentive to pursue curiosities with an algorithmic internet that likes to feed you information on a silver platter. It’s turned a lot of our brains into the cerebral equivalent of the humans from Wall-E — boneless, tuned-out, and complacent. It forces us to move along quickly. But if we can get stuck on something, be so dedicated to finding information that we become immovable, engage with such commitment as to slow down the passage of time, we can come out better for it.
Let yourself go down a rabbit hole, let yourself ask questions, and let yourself not know everything. You may just end up knowing more.
