Yesterday I was at a "cultivating curiosity" workshop beta-test. One concept was "there are different mental postures you can adopt, that affect how easy it is not notice and cultivate curiosities."

It wasn't exactly the point of the workshop, but I ended up with several different "curiosity-postures", that were useful to try on while trying to lean into "curiosity" re: topics that I feel annoyed or frustrated or demoralized about.

The default stances I end up with when I Try To Do Curiosity On Purpose are something like:

1. Dutiful Curiosity (which is kinda fake, although capable of being dissociatedly autistic and noticing lots of details that exist and questions I could ask)

2. Performatively Friendly Curiosity (also kinda fake, but does shake me out of my default way of relating to things. In this, I imagine saying to whatever thing I'm bored/frustrated with "hullo!" and try to acknowledge it and and give it at least some chance of telling me things)

But some other stances to try on, that came up, were:

3. Curiosity like "a predator." "I wonder what that mouse is gonna do?"

4. Earnestly playful curiosity. "oh that [frustrating thing] is so neat, I wonder how it works! what's it gonna do next?"

5. Curiosity like "a lover". "What's it like to be that you? What do you want? How can I help us grow together?"

6. Curiosity like "a mother" or "father" (these feel slightly different to me, but each is treating [my relationship with a frustrating thing] like a small child who is bit scared, who I want to help, who I am generally more competent than but still want to respect the autonomy of."

7. Curiosity like "a competent but unemotional robot", who just algorithmically notices "okay what are all the object level things going on here, when I ignore my usual abstractions?"... and then "okay, what are some questions that seem notable?" and "what are my beliefs about how I can interact with this thing?" and "what can I learn about this thing that'd be useful for my goals?"