Curiositas generates its own frenetic anxiety, because now I have to “keep up” and stay in the know, striving to be the person who knows before everybody else (Google “Portlandia OVER”). It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.” Which explains why this sort of pursuit of “truth” doesn’t ever feel like the beata vita, the happy life. As Heidegger puts it, “The bustling activity in which they are absorbed, the cheap tricks to which they abandon themselves, rather makes them even more miserable.”9 To be among “the enlightened ones” comes with its own anxiety—of being found out, of
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I'm guilty of this and at risk of it when I'm not already guilty.
