Off Book

The older I get, the more I worry about intellectual curiosity

A couple weeks ago, one of my favorite former students started writing Off Book, a Substack that I have thought about probably once a day since reading it.

She had gone to see Riz Ahmed perform Hamlet in a movie theater in Cambridge. She approached the whole thing like an Event. She refreshed the app waiting for showtimes to drop and got there early for a Diet Coke.

The theater was mostly empty, but to Lydia it may as well have been opening night at the Globe.

I recognized the type of excitement immediately. The very specific joy of caring about something deeply enough that the outside world briefly disappears.

About halfway through the play, she realized something horrifying:

She couldn’t really remember Hamlet anymore.

She couldn’t remember the order of the deaths. She and a friend got mixed up trying to untangle Claudius’ plot against Hamlet in the car afterward. At one point she mixed up Horatio and Benvolio, which — with love — is the sort of thing that makes English teachers briefly levitate out of their chairs.

The reason this rattled her was what got me.

This is not somebody who casually encountered Shakespeare once as a sophomore. She has a degree in English Literature. She performed Shakespeare in college theater at Notre Dame, once having major sections memorized. And when she was 18, she wrote her personal statement about believing you could learn everything important about life from Shakespeare.

Not because she thought it sounded smart. She actually believed it.

I think that’s why the forgetting felt so strange. It wasn’t really about forgetting a plot. It was about realizing adulthood had quietly pulled her farther away from a version of herself she assumed would always be there.

I understand that feeling more than I’d like to admit.

Last year, I gave a presentation on Charles Comiskey at an event hosted by the Chicago chapter of Society for American Baseball Research during Charles Comiskey Bobblehead Day at Chicago White Sox park.

You take one class in graduate school about baseball as the American narrative and suddenly it’s ten years later and you’re still trying to convince people that Buck Weaver got screwed and Charles Comiskey was more complicated than history gives him credit for.

Your brain just refuses to let the thread go.

And that’s the good stuff.

Not because it’s productive. Most of the time it isn’t. It’s not building a résumé or strengthening a college application or becoming some grand personal brand. Half the time it doesn’t even become anything tangible.

Your brain just feels awake.

And I worry sometimes that students are losing access to that feeling earlier than they used to.

The students I work with are thoughtful and funny and observant and capable — despite occasionally referring to apostrophes as “flying commas” and question marks as “mystery marks,” which honestly may be linguistically superior.

They are growing up in a culture that asks them to justify every interest almost immediately.

How will this help you?
Can this become leadership?
Does this strengthen your application?
Should you be spending time on this?

Eventually, even curiosity starts sounding transactional.

Honestly, teenagers know when they’re performing curiosity instead of actually feeling it. They can feel the difference.

You can hear it too when students talk about something they genuinely love. Their voice changes a little. They speed up. They stop editing themselves in real time.

Not the polished answer.
Not the carefully packaged “this experience taught me leadership” answer.

I mean the moment they accidentally stop trying to sound impressive because they’re too busy being interested.

That’s the student who suddenly starts talking too fast about urban design or marine biology or medieval poetry or transit systems or bird migration patterns or niche baseball history and forgets they’re technically in a college counseling meeting.

Those are usually my favorite conversations.

Not because they’re strategic. Honestly, they aren’t strategic at all.

You can feel the room change a little when somebody starts talking about something they genuinely love.

Ironically, colleges are often looking for that exact thing underneath all the polished achievement. Not perfection. Not a perfectly managed teenager who has converted every waking moment into résumé material.

They’re looking for students who still sound intellectually alive.

The kids who keep talking after the bell rings because they genuinely want to know the answer. The ones who disappear down rabbit holes and come back with seventeen tabs open and an entirely unrelated set of questions.

College is supposed to expand curiosity, not flatten it.

And maybe that’s why Lydia’s essay stayed with me.

Underneath the humor of forgetting Hamlet was a much bigger question sitting there quietly in the background:

What happens if we stop feeding the parts of ourselves that love to think?

What happens if we slowly become people who scroll instead of explore? People who optimize instead of wander a little?

It’s a life question.

This is what I want students to hear heading into summer:

Not everything you learn needs to become something.

You are allowed to read books that go nowhere.
You are allowed to become fascinated by strange things.
You are allowed to spend time on ideas that do not translate neatly into productivity, leadership, or a supplemental essay.

More than anything, I want students to hold onto the feeling of being intellectually awake for as long as they can.

Because if we’re lucky, we all end up in half-empty movie theaters someday still wanting to feel our brains light up again.