Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker

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Wonderbringers brings weekly nuggets of wonder to your mailbox every Wednesday,

with a deeper dive essay on the first Wednesday of every month.

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The Curiosity Tax: How Wonder Became the Next Luxury Good

Jaak Panksepp, in his book The Archaeology of the Mind, described seven primary emotional systems: play, care, lust, fear, rage, anxiety and seeking. Long before language, writing or agriculture, our brains were seeking — wondering and curious. Other animals make an exploration–exploitation trade‑off with their curiosity, spending roughly 20% of their time exploring and 80% exploiting what they’ve learned.

Human curiosity doesn’t work that way. We explore for knowledge and for play and for creativity and for pleasure. Cicero defined curiosity as an “innate love of learning and of knowledge… without the lure of any profit.” What happens when profit becomes the precondition for what we study, feel, and do — and curiosity is quietly taxed out of existence for most people?

The Degree You Can't Justify

For most of history, the examined life — reading widely, experimenting, asking big questions, studying things of beauty rather than things of profit — belonged to people who didn’t need to worry about money. The GI Bill briefly democratised that, granting working‑class Americans access to a liberal arts education that had once signalled privilege. But as lower‑income students entered higher education, universities built higher walls, raising fees to heights unreachable without taking on the heavy debt of student loans.

Now even accessing those loans is at risk. In the US, “value for money” reforms are tying student loan access to graduate earnings, turning a liberal arts degree into a financial gamble that only the wealthy can safely make. As one Oberlin student put it, those with financial stability “have the privilege to make mistakes and take chances. To us, college itself is a privilege.” And this is happening just as experts argue we need more humanities, not less, if we want an economy left when AI is done with us.

The Busyness Epidemic

We have never had so many time‑saving devices, and yet so little time. The productivity–leisure paradox means that as labour‑saving technology multiplies, our experience of time scarcity doesn’t improve, it actually deteriorates. We have dishwashers, washing machines, GPS, instant communication and Amazon and Uber Eats, and still feel more rushed than any generation on record. It’s another paradox. Efficiency creates capacity, but that capacity is instantly populated by more tasks.

Oxford economist Olivier Sterck offers a new lens on this. Instead of asking how many dollars a country produces, he asks how long it takes the average person to earn enough for a basic basket of goods. By this “average poverty” measure, the US is among the poorest developed nations. It takes an American about 63 minutes to earn what it takes a German only 26. Average poverty in the US is roughly double that of France, Germany and the UK, and has worsened sharply over the last 35 years. It is no surprise then that countries with more time, like France, the Netherlands, and the Nordics, also have higher arts participation and reported wellbeing. Curiosity needs cognitive slack, and cognitive slack is distributed about as unevenly as everything else in the American economy.

The Vanishing Patron and the Narrowing Imagination

For the small minority who ignore all of this long enough to become artists, writers, thinkers and explorers, the ground is shifting too. From the Medicis onward, wealthy patrons bankrolled art because they believed in its civilising power and wanted proximity to brilliance. Industrial‑era benefactors funded wonder-incubators like libraries and museums and made them free. They paid for scholarships, residencies, time and tools so a coal miner’s daughter or a secretary’s son had a real chance to turn talent into a body of work.

Today’s billionaires mostly want the aura, not the obligation. They’ll pay to have their names etched on a new museum wing, but are far less interested in the slow, unglamorous commitment of bankrolling artists’ lives. Money consolidates around prestige institutions while whole generations of working‑class creators are left to self‑fund or give up.

The result is a socially stratified creative class drawn from a narrow band of schools and postcodes. That doesn’t mean wealthy people make bad art. It means they make art from what they know, and when only one slice of society is making the work, culture feels like it isn’t talking to the rest of us.

Every person pushed out of creative life by precarity is a voice we never hear. There is no monument to the unmade film or the unwritten novel. The loss is invisible, but it accumulates.

Curiosity for a Caring, Flexible Mind

Curiosity isn’t just for artists. It’s how the brain keeps itself supple. Our capacity for neuroplasticity persists into old age, but only if we feed it real novelty. It needs fresh skills, new ideas, and unfamiliar people, not the same routines. When we meet challenges with the question, “What’s going on here, and what can I learn?” instead of “How do I escape this?”, we recruit neural networks that support cognitive flexibility instead of locking into threat mode. Over time, that perspective builds cognitive reserve, making us more resilient in the face of stress and better able to navigate the trials of later life.

Curiosity is also the root emotion of empathy. When we stay genuinely interested in other people’s inner worlds, we slow down snap judgments and engage the brain’s perspective‑taking circuits. It becomes much harder to flatten people into stereotypes or out-group them into enemies.

When Wonder Dividends are Hoarded

There is a particular perversity to the inequality of curiosity. The resilience and empathy dividends of a curious life are, in our current system, funnelled toward the group least inclined to put them to collective use. The “class–compassion gap” is well documented. People with fewer resources rely more on interdependence and mutual aid, so they tend to show stronger prosocial behaviour and more compassionate responses. The very wealthy, however, are cloistered from needing the support of their community and skew toward self‑focus and less empathy for people outside their own circle.

We have engineered a system that denies this incredible socially generative gift — a curious, flexible, empathic mind — to the people most likely to turn it outward in service of others. We hand the brain‑stretching novelty and wonder dividends to those most insulated from the world’s difficulties and then look puzzled when our politics and culture feel so impoverished.

Radical Hope: A Small, Stubborn Case for Wonder

The good news is that curiosity does not require a patron, a trust fund, or a perfectly empty calendar — though all of those help. Often it just needs permission. Someone in your life insisting that lingering with an idea or writing a poem or taking up painting is not a waste of time.

Let me be that person.

I give you permission — in our homes, classrooms and workplaces — to refuse the idea that only the narrowest, safest, most optimised path is the respectable one. To honor the kid who asks too many questions as much as the one who finishes the worksheet fastest. To resist the reflex to steer a young person away from something “impractical”, and cherish the moment when their eyes light up with ideas the world tells them are crazy. And you can give others permission too. By modelling, in our own lives, the ordinary bravery of being a beginner — of being unsure, and nervous, and convinced it’s a waste of time, and sticking with it.

And we can treat the preconditions for a curious society — affordable housing, predictable work hours, public libraries and museums, secure incomes, good arts education — not just as economic policy, but as wonder policy. Those are the policies that decide whether curiosity stays a common birthright or becomes a luxury item.

Einstein so revered the emotion, he called it “holy curiosity,” adding, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” The real question is whether we will protect the conditions that let everyone access their own passionate curiosity. A society that systematically underfunds curiosity will eventually find itself without the adaptive minds, empathic citizens, or creative culture it needs to survive what’s coming. A society that chooses otherwise — that treats wonder as a public good to be shared — is one we are still free to imagine and one we can start building together.

With wonder,

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