Coltan Scrivner

In fact, you usually feel curious about things you are sad or disgusted by.

Those are the kinds of things that are important to learn about, important to know about, and they matter.

And like in this case, people often ask me, are there any downsides to morbid curiosity?

Because I often talk about the potential benefits.

And I do that because

I truly think there are some potential benefits that are underexplored.

And because historically, there's kind of been this stigma already against morbid curiosity.

Like people already have intuitions about how it can be bad.

So I was curious about if it can be, how can it be good?

And there are some downsides to it, right?

If I sit at home and I just watch true crime all day and I don't go out into the world and engage with people, I'm going to start feeling paranoid.

I'm going to think that the world is more dangerous than it is.

I'm going to think people are more dangerous than they really are.

I think that some of the downsides like that, though...

are pretty easy to counter.

Like you just have to go out into the world and interact with real people to put some guardrails on those beliefs.

So I think there can be downsides, like there could be downsides to any personality trait.

You can be too extroverted, you can be too agreeable, you can be too neurotic, you can be too whatever.

You can also be too morbidly curious, but it's pretty easy to counteract those downsides.

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