May 15, 2025 l Manila Bulletin
The world feels more unstable than it has in decades. One day it’s a new trade war shaking up global markets. The next, a breakthrough in AI makes entire job categories uncertain. Add climate disruptions, geopolitical tensions, and economic volatility, and it’s no wonder people are feeling unsteady. Plans don’t hold. Predictions miss. And the tools we used to rely on for certainty—like experience, expertise, and even gut instinct—don’t always work the way they used to.
In the middle of all this unpredictability, I’ve found myself coming back to something deceptively simple: curiosity. It doesn’t solve the chaos. It doesn’t give you a neat answer. But it changes how you stand in the middle of it. Curiosity, as Elizabeth Weingarten writes in her book “How to Fall in Love with Questions,” isn’t just about gathering facts or solving puzzles. It’s about connecting—ideas, people, experiences, even fears. When everything feels unclear, curiosity offers a way to stay open instead of shutting down.
There’s a section in her article, “In Uncertain Times, Get Curious,” where she talks about how hard it can be to stay curious when we’re scared. And that hit home for me. It’s easy to get interested in questions that are neutral or fun, like why cats purr or how sourdough works. It’s much harder to stay curious about your job security, your health, or what the world might look like in five years. But that’s exactly when curiosity matters most.
Psychologists call it “need for cognition”—a trait linked to how much people enjoy thinking. It turns out that people who have a higher need for cognition, and by extension a more active sense of curiosity, report lower levels of anxiety and depression. That makes sense. When we’re afraid, we tend to fixate on a single outcome—usually the worst one. Curiosity helps loosen that grip. It says, “What else could happen? What haven’t I thought of yet?” That shift can be enough to keep you moving forward.
In business, we’ve seen what happens when leaders lose curiosity. Think of how Blockbuster laughed off Netflix, or how Kodak dismissed digital cameras. Both companies were rooted in assumptions they stopped questioning. They confused what had worked in the past with what would keep working. By the time they realized they needed to change, it was too late.
On the other hand, some of the most successful companies have curiosity baked into their culture. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, has talked about shifting the company from a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” one. That might sound like a small difference, but it’s everything. It means giving people space to ask dumb questions, to challenge what’s always been done, to say, “What if we tried this?” In a fast-changing industry, that kind of thinking isn’t a luxury—it’s survival.
This mindset isn’t limited to tech companies. In the early months of the pandemic, many restaurants were forced to shut down. But some owners asked, “What can we do differently?” They started selling meal kits, offering cooking classes over Zoom, or turning their kitchens into community food hubs. That kind of response didn’t come from certainty. It came from the willingness to ask better questions in a moment of deep uncertainty.
Weingarten also suggests a practice I’ve tried myself: talking to different versions of yourself. If I’m stuck in a hard place, I might imagine a conversation with my younger self—what would I tell her? Then I flip it and imagine future-me giving me advice. This kind of “mental time travel” helps pull me out of my current fear and reminds me I’ve been through uncertainty before. I didn’t always have the answers then either. But asking questions helped me find my way.
Curiosity isn’t flashy. It doesn’t always look like progress. But it keeps us from getting frozen. When things fall apart, it’s tempting to cling to the nearest expert or guru who promises easy answers. Weingarten calls them the “Charlatans of Certainty.” They sound good in the moment, but they flatten complexity and cut off exploration. Curiosity, in contrast, encourages complexity. It leaves space for nuance, contradiction, and even doubt.
That’s not always comfortable. Sometimes I don’t like what I find when I follow a question. But I’d rather live with discomfort than delusion. And over time, curiosity makes discomfort more bearable. You start to realize that not knowing everything doesn’t mean you’re failing—it means you’re still learning. That shift in mindset can be the difference between staying stuck and growing through the uncertainty.
We’re all looking for footholds right now. The world doesn’t seem to be getting any more predictable. So instead of chasing control, I’m trying to ask better questions. I don’t always find answers right away. But I usually find clarity, or at least a way forward. And in times like these, that’s enough.
***The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of his office as well as FINEX. For comments, email rey.lugtu@hungryworkhorse.com. Photo is from Pinterest.