Curiosity Kills Emptiness

Reclaim your free time from social media

The world is moving at a dizzying pace. Whether you think it is moving in the right direction, the wrong direction, or somewhere in between, most people would agree that things feel very fast right now.

I sometimes wonder whether every generation feels that way. We can objectively say that some things, like technology, are moving faster today than ever before. But acceleration is always relative. People in the 1980s may well have felt that the personal computer revolution was pushing technology faster than it had ever moved before.

Similarly, the now-common idea that if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product is often attributed to Andrew Lewis, who used that phrasing in 2010 when referring to Digg.com. At the time, it was largely about free social media platforms and their ability to attract attention with “free” services while monetizing the data and attention of their users.

But trading free products for marketable attention and data did not begin in the 2010s. The idea is at least as old as advertising itself.

That said, there is something unique about the mid-2020s. Over the sixteen years since 2010, the scale of “free” products has become unprecedented. Think about the products you use most: there is a good chance you do not pay for many of them. Most consumer services from Google are free. YouTube is free. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Spotify are all free or offer free tiers.

As these products have grown, so has the need for their creators not only to capture our attention but also to compete with one another to do so in the most addictive way possible.

It is no wonder, then, that it has become harder for us to think for ourselves.

Thinking requires space. And space requires time. But these companies also require our time, and they are better at capturing it than we are at protecting it.

Space and emptiness both arise from free time, but they are not the same.

Emptiness is what happens when the creation of space is not intentional. It is what happens when we find ourselves bored with time on our hands. It is the state that appears when boredom fills what could have been thinking space.

Even though Aristotle’s saying that “nature abhors a vacuum” has long since been disproven in physics, I would argue that it still holds true for time.

Your time will not remain empty for long. If you are bored and not intentional about how you spend your time, you will naturally fill it with whatever is easiest and most readily available. And the social media companies we discussed earlier are more than happy to fill that emptiness with as much dopamine as you have time for.

But we need time to think. We need moments away from the constant motion of everyday life in order to analyze, review, reflect and, ultimately, think.

So what are we supposed to do if several billion-dollar companies are pounding on the door with their dopamine machines every time we manage to create a little time for ourselves?

Creating thinking space requires intentionality. You cannot simply make time for yourself. You also need a clear plan for how you will protect that time from being filled with empty social media calories.

For me, sports has always been the easiest answer. Whenever I have free time, the first thing that tends to fill it is exercise. Sports conveniently force you to step away from social media, because most sports cannot be practiced while scrolling.

Beyond sports, my more general answer is curiosity.

Curiosity, by definition, comes from within. It begins with a thought and a desire to understand something more deeply.

That process of thinking, questioning, and learning does three important things.

First, it puts you in control. The process begins with your own thought. You decide how to satisfy your curiosity: a book, a conversation, a web search, or even a YouTube video. Yes, it is very different when you search YouTube intentionally than when you let it feed you whatever keeps you watching the longest.

Second, curiosity feeds on itself. Whatever you start exploring today will inevitably lead to more questions. And if you allow yourself to pursue those questions, you may find that several hours have passed learning about something that genuinely interests you.

But most importantly, curiosity cultivates the mind.

When you embrace your curiosity and give it space, you ask questions. When you ask questions, you find answers that lead to more questions. Eventually you realize that some of your questions are uniquely yours, and that the answers to them have not yet been written.

At that point, you go out into the world to engage with it and find those answers.

People who do this consistently rarely experience emptiness when they have free time, because they are not bored. Their time produces thinking space, and that thinking space protects them from one of the defining afflictions of our era: having our brains slowly rotted by social media companies.

With deep curiosity, you can not only protect your free time from these social media companies, you can also leverage the best thing they offer: a remarkable window into the creative minds of people all over the world. At its best, social media lets you see ideas, projects, and perspectives that would have been almost impossible to encounter just a generation ago.

Yes, if you let it, it can also turn you into a mindless scrolling machine. But if you approach it with curiosity, some of that content can become a jumping-off point for your own journeys of learning.

Curiosity is what transforms free time into thinking space instead of emptiness.