You Haven't Had to Wonder About Anything Since Bill Clinton Was in Office
And your brain is worse for it
You’re eight. It’s 1992. You’re lying on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, wondering how tornadoes start. Your mom doesn’t know. The encyclopedia has a diagram but it doesn’t quite answer what you’re actually asking. So the question just... stays. It follows you to the bus stop, drifts through recess, resurfaces when you’re supposed to be asleep.
No phone. No search bar. No instant clarity. Just you and the question, circling each other for days.
Back then, a question was something you lived with. It didn’t demand immediate resolution. It reshaped itself as you played, as you walked home, as you stared out the car window. That slowness wasn’t a bug — it was the engine of curiosity.
When Answers Required a Journey
In 1992, getting an answer took effort. You asked adults who didn’t always know. You waited for your dad to get home from work because he might. You flipped through books that led you to other books. You marked the question in your mind: Ask the librarian on Saturday.
The question stayed alive the whole time, unfolding in the background of your thoughts.
That waiting wasn’t empty. Psychologists now call this “incubation” — the period when your brain’s default mode network quietly forms connections, tests possibilities, and integrates fragments of knowledge you didn’t even know you had. You were learning before you found the answer. You were building a mental model of how the world might work, feeling out the edges of what seemed true.
The answer, when it finally came, had a place to land.
The Encyclopedia Effect
I used to spend hours lying on the floor with a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia open in front of me. Not looking anything up — just wandering. Letting my attention snag on whatever image or word seemed strange or beautiful.
You’d turn from tarantulas to tectonic plates to Tchaikovsky to tungsten without ever intending to. And the detours weren’t wasted time. They expanded the perimeter of your mind. They built what neuroscientists now call cognitive flexibility — the ability to jump between ideas, see sideways connections, and imagine alternatives.
Modern research confirms that this kind of unguided exploration activates regions tied to divergent thinking. In other words, “getting lost” was part of how your brain learned to be creative.
But you didn’t know that then. You just knew it felt good to follow your attention wherever it wanted to go.
Efficiency Killed the Wander
Now it’s 2025. A kid wonders that same thing — how tornadoes start — and before the question can settle into their imagination, a parent has pulled up a 90-second YouTube explainer with HD graphics and a cheerful narrator. Question answered. Mystery closed. The default mode network never even wakes up.
Search is astonishingly effective. But its efficiency hides a cost.
The incubation window closes before it opens. We get answers, but we don’t get understanding. We collect facts, but we don’t build mental models. The moment curiosity sparks, it’s smothered by precision.
When every unknown is resolved instantly, the mind loses the very friction that once shaped it.
The Shrinking Inner Landscape
Instant answers eliminate the blank space where imagination used to roam. Those moments on the bus, in the kitchen, lying in bed before sleep — the spaces where a question could drift, mutate, collide with something else you were half-thinking about — are now filled with quick hits of certainty.
We’ve forgotten how to be bored in productive ways. The kind where your mind wanders from your homework to wondering why shadows are different lengths at different times of day, then back to your homework, then to whether birds get cold. That meandering path wasn’t distraction. It was your brain building the capacity to think in layers.
Ask someone to explain their favorite book and watch how often they reach for their phone to fact-check a detail. We’ve lost trust in our own reconstructions of meaning. We think through search engines now rather than with them. The difference is subtle but vast.
And the effects accumulate. Attention narrows. Curiosity thins. Ideas feel more linear and less surprising. We can still generate thoughts, but we’ve outsourced the work of sitting with them.
Psychologist Daniel Schacter calls memory’s natural fading “transience,” and argues it’s essential for how we make meaning and form identity. But we’ve engineered the opposite: permanent, immediate recall. Answers with no journey behind them.
When the unknown lasts only a second, imagination stops showing up. Why would it? It never gets invited to the conversation.
Kids Still Remember How to Wonder
Children don’t naturally think in straight lines. My five-year-old asked last week why the moon follows our car.
Before I could pull out my phone, he added: “Maybe it’s curious about us? Or maybe it’s just really, really fast and we don’t notice?”
He was building a cosmology. Testing theories. My phone would have given her the angle-of-observation explanation and closed that world down.
Kids don’t want sterile, optimized answers. They want the room to explore the question. The chain of “but why?” isn’t annoying — it’s divergent thinking in motion. It’s exactly what their brains are built to do.
But when we respond instantly — with facts, with definitions, with the tidy endpoints delivered by a search bar — we compress that branching path. We accidentally teach them that questions should be resolved, not explored. That wondering should lead somewhere concrete as fast as possible.
Curiosity becomes something to clear, not something to follow.
A Small, Radical Practice
If you’re reading this and you remember 1992 — or 1987, or 1996, or any year before Google — you know what I’m talking about. You remember what it felt like to not know something for longer than it takes to unlock your phone.
The fix isn’t to swear off technology. It’s simpler — and more subversive — than that:
Carry a question again.
Not forever. Not even for an hour. Just... longer than a second.
Let it linger while you pour coffee. Write it down in your notebook. Guess wildly. Notice what your mind does with the silence. Invite your kids into the process before you reach for the screen:
“Hmm... what do you think?”
“Let’s imagine a few possibilities first.”
“Let’s make a prediction before we look it up.”
Try this: When your kid asks a question, answer it wrong — playfully, obviously wrong. “Why is the sky blue? Because it’s sad that the sun has to leave every day.” Watch what happens. They’ll laugh. They’ll correct you. They’ll build theories. They’re thinking, not just receiving.
What you’re doing in these moments is reopening the door to incubation, to divergent thinking, to the quiet cognitive work that helps us understand the world instead of just labeling it.
You’re rebuilding the landscape where curiosity used to live.
The Whole Point
We didn’t lose curiosity — we starved it of time.
The world is still full of hidden facts and surprising connections and beautiful detours. But you can only find them if you pause before you search. If you let uncertainty hang in the air long enough for your imagination to wake up and stretch.
Last week I let a question sit for three days: Why do we say “fall in love” but never “fall in friendship”? I never looked it up. But I thought about gravity, about surrender, about how language knows things before we do. The question became a companion. It changed shape. It connected to other thoughts I didn’t know I was having.
I didn’t need the answer. I needed the company.
Carry a question again. Even for a minute. That’s all it really takes to reopen a forgotten part of your mind — the part that knew, in 1992, how to wonder without rushing toward the end.