What If Curiosity Isn't a Choice?
All the advice to "stay curious" sounds empowering ... until you ask what it demands of someone in survival mode.
Back in January 2023, Google laid off 12,000 employees. In the weeks that followed, LinkedIn was filled with a now-familiar post genre: the graceful departure note, the “excited for what’s next” declaration, the advice from career coaches and well-meaning connections. Threading through nearly all of it, one word appeared with striking regularity: curiosity.
Stay curious. Get curious about what’s next. Approach the job market with curiosity, not fear.
It’s advice that sounds right; it even sounds generous. I’m not so convinced. I keep returning to a question, “stay curious,” never quite answers: What happens when the person receiving that advice can barely keep their head above water?
The curiosity gospel
Curiosity has become one of the most celebrated virtues in the professional advice landscape, and not without reason. Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, in The Start-Up of You, describe curiosity as a kind of contagion: something difficult to teach but easy to catch from others, and once caught, nearly impossible to shake. The framing is appealing. Curiosity as a virus: organic, self-sustaining, infectious in the best sense.
Jenny Wood pushes the idea even further in Wild Courage. For Wood, curiosity isn’t just an orientation; it’s a probability engine. Want to find a job? A partner? A coach? Get curious, cast wide, and let serendipity do its work. She relays her mother’s advice to turn worry into wonder, a phrase that’s almost too tidy, but captures the spirit of the argument. Curiosity, in this telling, is a faucet you open. The more you open it, the more it flows through.
These aren’t bad ideas. Hoffman is right that proximity to curious people reshapes what we notice. Wood is right that openness expands the surface area for serendipity. Embedded in both accounts is an assumption worth examining: that curiosity is essentially available to us whenever we decide to reach for it. That it’s a posture we adopt, an attitude we choose, a lever within arm’s reach at all times.
The moments when we most need curiosity are often the moments when we are least equipped to access it.
What the body already knows
Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre, in Healing Developmental Trauma, offer a reframe. They describe curiosity not as a mindset or a choice, but as a biological state: the body’s natural movement outward when it senses no threat. To see it in its purest form, they suggest, watch a healthy toddler or a puppy encountering a new room. The exploration is joyful, unguarded, full of discovery. That openness isn’t willed into existence; instead, it emerges because the organism feels safe enough to direct its attention outward rather than inward.
Curiosity, in this framework, is not a tool you deploy to manage a crisis. It’s the signal that the crisis has resolved. It becomes available again only after the body has completed what Heller and LaPierre call the defensive-orienting response, the sequence of protective reactions triggered by perceived threat. Until that sequence completes, the nervous system is occupied. It’s scanning for danger, bracing, conserving. It is doing exactly what it should. And the last thing it’s equipped for is open-ended exploration.
This reframes the standard advice in uncomfortable ways. Telling someone who just lost their job to “get curious about what’s next” is a bit like telling someone mid-flinch to relax their shoulders. The instruction isn’t wrong, exactly. Having our shoulders relaxed is better. But the flinch isn’t a choice, it’s a response. The relaxation that follows it can’t be commanded. It has to be earned, usually through some combination of time, safety, and support.
A pattern that holds across domains
The career space isn’t the only place where curiosity gets prescribed at the point of maximum vulnerability. In Getting the Love You Want, Helen LaKelly Hunt distinguishes unconscious and conscious relationships. In the unconscious version, we insist that our partner be more like us. In the conscious version, we move away from assumptions and judgment and toward curiosity, thereby discovering who our partner actually is and accepting that they are not us.
It’s a profound shift. Notice what it requires: enough felt safety within the relationship to loosen one’s grip on self-protection. Moving from judgment to curiosity about another person (especially one who has hurt or disappointed you in the past) requires that the defensive-orienting response has quieted enough to allow outward attention. The very act of “getting curious” about a partner presupposes that you aren’t in survival mode.
The pattern holds in learning, too. Students who may feel threatened by unclear expectations or environments where they sense they don’t belong aren’t choosing to be incurious. Their attention is directed inward, toward self-protection, toward scanning for signals about whether it’s safe to stay. Curiosity doesn’t flourish under those conditions. It waits.
Curiosity as harvest
So if curiosity can’t be willed into existence during moments of crisis, what do we do with all this advice?
I think the answer lies in a subtle but important shift. In Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte describes the practice of holding open-ended questions, questions that invoke wonder about the world and don’t have a single answer. It’s a beautiful idea. But perhaps those questions aren’t the starting point the advice industry wants them to be. Perhaps they’re the arrival, the thing that becomes possible once the ground beneath us is steady enough to support open-ended exploration.
This changes the prescription. Instead of telling people to get curious, we might ask: What would it take to create the conditions where curiosity can return on its own? What does it look like to tend to safety (our own and others’) as a precondition for the openness we value so highly?
Curiosity, at its best, isn’t a switch. It’s a harvest. You don’t flip it on; you cultivate the soil through relationship, through stability, through the slow and unglamorous work of helping a nervous system feel safe enough to look outward again. The toddler doesn’t decide to explore. The toddler explores because nothing in the room says don’t.
Maybe that’s the real question buried under all the well-meaning advice: not “How do I become more curious?” but “What in my environment is preventing curiosity from doing what it naturally does?”
Trust for Thought
Think about a time you were told to “stay open” or “get curious” during a period of genuine fear or uncertainty. Did the advice land, or did it feel like one more demand on an already overtaxed system?
What would it have looked like if someone had tended to your safety first and let curiosity arrive on its own schedule?
Further Reading
Forte, T. (2022). Building a second brain: A proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Atria Books.
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Hoffman, R., & Casnocha, B. (2012). The start-up of you: Adapt to the future, invest in yourself, and transform your career. Crown Business.
Hunt, H. L. (2023). Getting the love you want: A guide for couples (Rev. ed.). St. Martin’s Griffin.
Wood, J. (2025). Wild courage: A field guide to 16 audacious habits that will set you apart and get you ahead. Portfolio.