The reason you don’t feel smart is because you’ve stopped asking questions

intelligence is just curiosity in motion

Nietzche believed that the highest form of life wasn’t about knowing, but about becoming. It was about maintaining a constant state of questioning, movement, and growth. For him, “truth” wasn’t something hidden underground that you eventually discovered by searching hard enough. It’s something temporary, always shifting depending on where you stand. What keeps us going isn’t just having the right answers, but to continue asking better questions.

The real danger, Nietzche argued, isn’t ignorance, but certainty. When you’re certain, you’re frozen in place, rigid and unwilling to change. Becoming is about letting go of the comfort that certainty provides. Let yourself stay unfinished, open to contradiction, willing to move forward. And let curiosity drive that motion.

But most of us find ourselves stuck when confronted with curiosity.

It doesn’t happen all at once. It creeps in slowly, almost without notice. Schools train us to only care about the “right” answer, rather than the trail of questions that led us there. Our workplaces reward speed and productivity over taking the time needed to explore. Even online, where infinite knowledge is at our finger tips, we rarely follow our own questions. Instead, we skim through paragraphs, off-loading the “dumb” questions to AI to avoid the inconvenience of exploring our curiosity. Little by little, our instinct to ask questions disappears.

Because these questions make us vulnerable. They expose gaps in our intellect, they create self-doubt. It’s easier to simply consume answers that have been pre-packaged by someone else, rather than sitting with the discomfort of not knowing.

Barry Schwartz calls this the paradox of choice: when you’re faced with too many options, you don’t feel free—you freeze. Curiosity works in that way. When surrounded by endless facts, articles, opinions, and explanations, it’s easier to simply shut down. You don’t follow your own line of inquiry because there are a thousand paths to take. And there’s a shame that if you were “truly smart”, you’d already know where to begin.

This is why so many of us quietly feel stupid. It’s not because we can’t think, but that we’ve stopped wanting to know. We don’t ask the questions that carry us forward, the questions that keep our intelligence alive and in motion.

Most of us regard curiosity as something innate in children, but something adults naturally grow out of. But curiosity isn’t some fragile magic that slips away with age—it’s a skill. And, like any skill, it only grows if you continue to practice it.

It’s not that every “smart” person you admire is innately smarter than you. What they’ve preserved is the willingness to keep asking questions—the obvious ones, the inconvenient ones, the ones that risk making them look naïve. The difference isn’t raw intelligence, but the permission they give themselves to stay in constant motion.

Curiosity is like a muscle you can train. You can rewire your brain to notice and to wonder, even when nothing obvious is calling your name.

You need to get yourself in the habit of asking better questions. What is this? ends conversations. But How does this work? or Why does this exist? opens them up. The quality of your questions determines the quality of your curiosity trail.

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