The opposite of curiosity is a word which sounds like death: hebetude

To be curious is to be audacious. Not in a grandstanding way, but in the quiet defiance of refusing to let the world go unexplored. Curiosity is not just a trait. It is propulsion. A vector. A form of courage dressed in intellectual appetite. And if we are to take anything seriously in our technologically infused, algorithmically governed century, then we must be honest: curiosity is the most consistently underrated force in human history. Otherwise, why would we drill rote learning into young minds?

Forget the tired cliché that curiosity killed the cat. What it actually did was invent calculus, rewrite genomes, decode starlight, and build machines that imitate human thinking. The cat, one suspects, died quite content, probably while reverse, engineering Schrödinger’s box.

Feynman, the great showman of physics, who intimated that the pleasure of finding things out was akin to sex. He was only half-joking. To him, curiosity was not the means to an end. It was the end.