When Curiosity Moves
A decade going inward, and what I did about it
"Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
- T.S. Eliot
This one is personal.
I resigned from my job last week.
I didn’t do it for a better one. I did it because the work I began in 2014, what I came to call the Inward Turn, has stopped being something I can keep on the side of my desk.
This essay is the long version of that sentence.
Rewind sixteen months.
In January 2025 I wrote an annual mission for myself. It wasn’t long. It included this:
“This year I want to bring new perspectives and new thinking to what I do. One of the shortcomings I see in myself is too much left brain, analytical, quantitative thinking. 2025 will be about countering that. To think more creatively, to step back and see the bigger picture.”
A month later, more bluntly: “A few months ago I realised that after over 25 years in finance I had let my life and work become too left-brain led. I became all ROI and excel led and had lost a lot of my soul and humanity.”
That was the diagnosis. I had felt it longer than I had said it. I had been good at one mode of thinking for a long time, and out of practice with the other. I didn’t yet know what to do about it. Naming it didn’t fix anything. It only made the rest of the year possible.
I called what came next the Inward Turn.
By autumn the personal pattern was harder to see as only personal.
In October I tried to put it into words. I wrote:
“How to stay human in systems that tug us away from ourselves. Whether those systems are technological, biological, chemical, or geopolitical, the task is the same. To remember what is ours, and to live it.”
That sentence was the inward turn becoming an outward one. The private work I was doing began to feel like a participation in something rather than a curiosity off to the side. Not because the work had changed. Because it had begun to look like the most important work I could be doing with my own life.
By December the year had a question in it.
I had been writing toward this question without quite naming it. Then, in the final issue of the year, I named it: “At the grand old age of 48, I’ve been thinking more about what is the point and what are we really solving for?” And I offered the closest thing I had to an answer: “Maybe the POINT is love, validation, connection. Maybe it’s to know we are good, that we mattered, that we had an impact.”
That is not a question one answers with a quarterly review. It is the kind of question that, once it surfaces, will not let you treat it as rhetorical.
Decades of teachers and books and exercises had done one thing for me: it had cleared enough of the noise that I could finally hear the question I had been carrying. The question, it turned out, came with an instinct about the answer: to follow what was bringing me alive.
I ended that issue with a line meant for the reader and, I now see, also meant for me:
“What will be your beautiful craft? I hope you find it and let yourself get carried away with it!”
I came into 2026 knowing I would not end the year in the job.
I has been quietly fighting some version of this for a decade. The work had been good to me. The daily experience of doing it had emptied out of curiosity. The 2025 work, I now see, was what finally let me stop fighting.
I gave it space in January, February, March, April, hoping it would go away. I hoped the feeling would pass. It did not. What came instead was a slower kind of knowing: intuition. Trusting what was bringing me alive and what was not.
What I am leaving is harder to name than salary or title. It is the world’s polite welcome of an institution, which I had spent a career mistaking for its welcome of me. I am about to find out which part of that welcome was actually mine.
The Curious Mind, no longer a side practice but the work itself. The Brain Trust. Continuing to invest on my own terms. And, behind all three, one principle I am taking seriously enough to act on:
If curiosity is what we follow, and what we are curious about changes, then our quests and our days have to change with it.
I do not know exactly what comes next. I know which direction it is in.
If you have read this far, you have followed a year of mine that the people I worked alongside never saw. That is what publications like this one are for.
The Curious Mind will get more of me now. Not slicker, not more polished, just more of the time and attention I used to spend elsewhere, pointed at the same intersection of markets, technology, and what makes a life worth living.
I do not know what the next year writes. I know the question I have been carrying is still alive, and now allowed to lead.
Curiosity moves. The honest thing is to move with it. Even when moving means leaving.
That is the work. I would like to keep doing it next to you.
“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us."
- Joseph Campbell
I can't wait to see what comes next! Good luck on the journey. I will be following along.
Congratulations. As someone on the same journey, I'm curious how yours proceeds.