The Modern Wonderer

Hello all. Some of you may be new to the site. Some may have been to this site in its previous format “themodernwonderer.wordpress.com”. Through the loveliness of technology, I had the opportunity (read: the other website somehow got ‘lost’) to restart this website under a new domain. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to migrate all the other lovely stories I had already done. Oh well! Always room for a new adventure.

For those of you who may be new, Welcome!!!

You may be wondering (ha ha), what is “The Modern Wonderer?” Well, it’s a lot of things. Mostly, it is born out of my innate curiosity. I love learning. In another life I could have seen myself being a professor, or professional student, constantly roaming the dusty hallways of a library. I love asking questions. In fact, my boyfriend calls me his ‘human Google’ because he knows all he has to do is ask me a question and I’ll inevitably look it because I just can’t stand not knowing. Which means my head if full of a lot of useless trivia. They love me at game night!

Vocabulary.com states that a wonderer is “someone who is curious about something; someone who uses the mind creatively”.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about curiosity. As a kid, it’s all you have because it’s how you connect to the world. Why is the sky blue? Why is the stove hot? Why does the cat meow? Why is my hair this color? It’s how you figure out who you are, and define yourself away from your parents, friends, teachers, etc. It’s how we discover ideas and form opinions. What do I like? What kind of job do I want? Curiosity leads to knowledge (with knowledge being loosely defined as ‘anything you believe to be true’), which affects everything we do in modern life: voting, financial moves, employment, where we live, who we hang out with, what we do for our hobbies. The list goes on.

But knowledge can be fraught with issues. If you just believe everything you read/hear/see, without fact checking or weighing where the information is coming from, you can be lead down incorrect paths. Human beings are filled with all sorts of biases and complicated psychology that, if not checked, can lead us down some very dark paths with bad endings. On the same hand, the information we have can change depending on new discoveries or new interpretations. Historical knowledge is ripe with issues from loss of information (artifacts, written texts), systemic wipeouts from competing regimes or religious extremists, or just the fact that many ‘historical accounts’ of wars/cultures/regions are written centuries after the fact or by the victors who saw fit to wipe out said tribe. Science has its own issues. We’ve all grown use to believing the statistic “9 out of 10 (insert expert) say (insert topic of choice)”. Yet how was the study conducted? By whom? Who sponsored it? What scientific journals has it been presented in? Has the outcome been repeated? The truth is that any fact can be mishandled/misrepresented/misspoke to mislead us.

That’s where I believe curiosity comes in. So many times as children we are told “because I said so” or “that’s the way it is”. We’re taught to obey, to not ask questions, to not push the status quo. We have statements like “curiosity killed the cat”, warning us to not ask too many questions. But I think for our society to become an intelligent reasoning society, WE NEED CURIOSITY! We need to normalize and socialize asking questions. Getting answers. Not believing everything we hear, or just going with “this is what they taught me in school, so that’s how everything is”. History is always changing. Science is always changing. Our perception of the world through bias is always changing. If we are going to ever truly understand the world we live in, we need to be willing to learn new things, ask questions and be flexible enough to understand that our opinions can and should change as we receive new information. But also have the curiosity to explore that information and test whether it is valid or not.

Plus, it’s always fun to learn new things!

As a writer and artist, I love learning new things about history, art, science, psychology, and whatever else that sparks my interest. It inspires me, helping me to create more authentic stories, and sometimes sparks stories and questions. What would this have been like if this had happened? What if this occurred? How would people react?

This blog is going to be a rambling collection of questions I’ve asked myself. What is the history of this? Why do we do that? What is the origin of this thing?

I hope you have the curiosity to come along on the ride and spark your inner childlike wonder.

Are you ready to be a Modern Wonderer like me?