Satisfying Curiosity
Throughout my career, I devoted myself to
acquiring the practical knowledge and skills needed to achieve meaningful
results. After retiring, however, I gradually drifted away from my professional
field, and my interests naturally expanded to broader subjects such as history
and physics. There is a quiet joy in discovering, one by one, things I had
never known before and satisfying my pure intellectual curiosity. That feeling
resembles the deep contentment of enjoying a truly satisfying meal. As a
citizen, I also remain interested in politics, economics, diplomacy, and
national security. Yet these fields are deeply shaped by conflicting human
interests, values, and ambitions. Even when I gain new knowledge in those
areas, it rarely satisfies my intellectual curiosity in the same way, because
the issues are shaped less by universal principles than by conflicting human
interests and values.