Spring 2025 — Curiosity

A Year in Review: Where the Questions Began

Spring began with noise.

War in Ukraine. War in Israel. Inflation, tariffs, immigration, healthcare—each issue arriving fully formed, packaged with certainty, and delivered at a pace that made reflection feel like a luxury. Claims were made boldly. Counterclaims followed just as quickly. And somewhere in the middle, we were told—sometimes explicitly—not to trust our own senses.

The questions piled up.

Not partisan questions. Practical ones.

Is this true?
Does this actually work the way it’s being described?
And why does every answer seem to expire by the next news cycle?

That was the moment I started using a new tool in a new way.

I had already been using ChatGPT—Beth, as I call her—for work: research, analysis, untangling complex business systems. But in March, I began using the same conversational approach to slow the news down. Instead of reacting to headlines, I asked questions and let the research catch up.

At first, my questions looked like searches: short, blunt, transactional. “Inflation reasons.” But that quickly changed. Queries became conversations. I stopped asking for keywords and started asking for understanding.

The rhythm mattered. I’d ask a question. Beth would respond. Beth would ask me to clarify. I’d push back. She’d narrow scope. The process didn’t produce certainty—but it produced discipline.

That discipline helped burst my own bubble.

I could read a headline, feel the spike of panic, and then slow it down—check context, trace sources, test assumptions. Sometimes the process eased my concerns. Other times, it amplified them. Not because Beth cared, but because she didn’t. The lack of emotional investment turned out to be an advantage. The responses were blunt, imperfect, and grounded in probability rather than performance.

One of the first topics I tested this way was tariffs.

I’m not an economist, but I’ve spent years around banking and supply chains. I know a few basic truths: companies exist to make money, and increased costs don’t disappear—they move. So when claims surfaced that companies would absorb tariffs without passing costs along, something didn’t add up.

That discomfort became a pattern.

Rather than arguing positions, I started interrogating mechanics. Who pays? Who benefits? What assumptions are baked into the explanation? Tariffs, fentanyl policy, climate change, institutional power—all very different topics, but all governed by incentives, information flow, and human behavior.

The next question wasn’t what’s true—it was what do I do with what I’m learning?

My first instinct was efficiency. Short fact checks. Clean summaries. Social-media-ready statements. But that approach collapsed nuance into punchlines and repeated the same mistake I was pushing back against.

So I tried something else: blogging.

Not to declare expertise, but to explore openly. To document questions rather than conclusions. That was intimidating. I’m dyslexic. Writing has never been effortless. And I wasn’t pretending to be an expert—just someone willing to ask questions in public.

The early results were humbling. My first blog—on tariffs—was far too long. It had three readers. One of them was me. But it taught me something important: people don’t come for nuance. They come for emotion.

That lesson shaped everything that followed.

Shorter posts. Clearer titles. Images that invited attention rather than demanded agreement. Series instead of single essays. Climate change broken into manageable pieces. History revisited for narrative rather than revelation. Even AI itself became a topic—how it works, where it fails, and why conversation with a machine can clarify rather than replace thinking.

By the end of March, nothing was resolved. But something had changed.

Curiosity stopped being reactive. It became deliberate.

Spring wasn’t about answers yet.
It was about learning how to ask better questions.

And that momentum carried forward.