Curiouser and Curiouser
On this New Moon, the day before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I'm trading resentment for curiosity. I'm not sure if you believe in those kinds of things, but I do. And today's New Moon in Virgo is asking me to take stock of my actions and habits and the ways I choose to live my life. So I'm on day four of a daily pilates streak, I'm being mindful of what I'm putting in my body, drinking a ton of water, and staying observant of my feelings and my thoughts. Living my life as my favorite version of myself, the moon reminds me to do this. Perhaps living your life as your best version of yourself some other sacred day or moment reminds you, or maybe Siri, or Claude, or Alexa.
How Was Resentment Born?
As a child, I could never have felt it, having too much curiosity to understand the why of things. Resentment asks no questions, feeds on assumptions, and jumps to conclusions. I guess as children we don't have very many conclusions yet to jump to, or at least the lucky ones of us don't. Resentment is a learned emotion, and one that comes to us as we mature into forming our own ideas about the world. Resentment is invited in when those ideas about the world quietly become conclusions. Resentment grows in the assumption that we have enough information and lived experience to come to some conclusion about the world. And heaven help us when those conclusions become beliefs. And may all the gods save us when those beliefs become a cause.
Communication researcher Judee Burgoon has a name for this: expectancy violations theory, the idea that we carry a set of expectations into every interaction, and that how we respond to someone depends heavily on whether those expectations are met, exceeded, or violated. Resentment, in other words, is what happens when the violation goes unacknowledged.
What Is Resentment, Actually?
It's that combination of negative feelings we get when we have an expectation of some outcome or behavior external to ourselves, and our expectation is not met. That combination of feelings can include, among others, varying degrees of anger, frustration, embarrassment, shame, grief, fear, and jealousy. These negative emotions require our having accepted our version of reality as true and correct, absent of other perspectives.
Philosopher Peg O'Connor writes about this same gap in Psychology Today, calling expectations "future resentments, carefully cultivated." She draws a distinction I keep coming back to, between legitimate expectations, grounded in shared reality and mutual understanding, and illegitimate ones, built out of hope instead of fact. We want something badly enough that we start expecting it, and then we feel betrayed when reality declines to cooperate.
What Makes Curiosity Wane?
Resentment is a social phenomenon. Because it is a matter of failed expectations, we have to ask ourselves how our expectations were formed in the first place. Oftentimes they are born out of the social norms and values we're exposed to in our communities, either in alignment with our experiences or out of a desire to have something different for ourselves as we mature. And when we live in a community that consistently reflects our values back to us without regular exposure to other lived experiences and perspectives through reading, music, art, media, travel, and other types of education, we forget our need to be curious about others. We simply fall out of practice.
Cognitive scientist Raymond Nickerson gave this its own name in a landmark 1998 paper: confirmation bias, our tendency to seek out, interpret, and remember information in ways that support what we already believe, while quietly discounting anything that challenges it. It isn't a character flaw so much as a default human setting that runs quietly in the background of every belief we hold and every conclusion we're tempted to draw.
Curiosity Is a Practice
Curiosity asks questions, seeks understanding, and simultaneously holds space for others while taking space for ourselves. Curiosity is an art that can be refined as we learn to form our questions in the ways they can be best received. Curiosity is compassionate as we learn to have dialogue while maintaining healthy relationships.
Psychologist Todd Kashdan, who has spent much of his career at George Mason University studying curiosity's role in well-being, calls it something close to the engine of growth. What I find most useful about his research is that he doesn't treat curiosity and anxiety as travel companions. Every unfamiliar situation hands us the same fork in the road: retreat into what feels safe, or stay curious long enough to find out what's actually there. If this idea has you nodding, I wrote a whole post on beginner's mind that goes deeper on a similar topic.
Curiosity Is Liminal
It is a moment of pause in what otherwise feels like a fast-paced interaction. It is sometimes the calm in the eye of the storm, when it can lead to a moment of stillness in the middle of anger. Or it can be the oasis of water and shade in the desert, when it offers a moment of love or affection in the middle of overwhelm and confusion. It clears the air, and invites us to do our best thinking by acting from a place of being emotionally informed rather than emotionally driven.
Anthropologists have a word for this kind of in-between space. They call it liminal, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Arnold van Gennep first used the term to describe the middle stage of a rite of passage, the part where you've left who you were and haven't yet become whoever comes next. Victor Turner later expanded it into one of anthropology's most enduring ideas, a space stripped of status and certainty, where transformation becomes possible precisely because nothing is fixed yet.
Human beings are not inherently comfortable in liminal spaces. We are beings of action. We have shaped the world around us into a design that serves us. And acting from in between is quite nearly impossible. How can we build a bridge before we've decided what it will connect? And we do not do well to sit on our hands. Which is why so many shudder at the word meditation, when the idea of sitting still, not doing and not thinking, feels antithetical to existence. Yet it is this ability to get liminal, to expand into a moment and consider, that makes curiosity possible, and that often results in getting slow for a moment to go faster in the long run.
Curiosity Is Efficient
Curiosity is efficient when you consider that it doesn't fall into the pitfalls of a plan built on false assumptions. Curiosity gets to the bottom of things and understands the true nature of things. In life, and in operations, that's so important. Does that mean that just because we're curious we always get things right on the first try? No, of course not. Every decision is limited to the completeness of the data set upon which it is based, and even the most curious mind can miss a heretofore unknown dependency or idiosyncrasy within a system.
Harvard Business School researcher Francesca Gino found something almost everyone in operations already suspects when she studied this inside organizations. Curiosity, genuinely activated, helps people think more deeply and rationally about decisions, generate more creative solutions, and build more trusting, more collaborative relationships with the people around them. And yet most leaders say they value curious, inquisitive minds, and then actively manage that same curiosity out of their teams, worried it will slow things down or introduce risk they can't control. In my own experience running operations for organizations at every size, that worry entirely backwards. The plans that fail are rarely the ones that took too long to interrogate. They're the ones built fast, on assumptions nobody stopped to test, by teams that had stopped asking why.
On the eve of the anniversary of this day of honor, remembrance, and the processing of collective grief, I will light a candle under this Virgo New Moon, as I invite curiosity into my life, into my relationships, and into my business, helping me to become increasingly available to a deeper understanding of the needs of those that I love and those that I serve.
