The 14-Year-Old Boy

I'm writing this blog with no clear goal in mind apart from just… writing. Growing up in a religious household, a lot of the questions I had as a teenager got shut down by the people around me. They weren't being malicious, they were most likely doing it out of love. They wanted to give me the same framework that gave them meaning. Genuinely believing that they were protecting me. The 14-year-old boy who got his questions shut down is the same person writing today, years later with no clear goal in mind.

Human evolution has always fascinated me as a kid — even more as a teenager. I wanted to learn more about where we come from as a species. The same species that started out drawing in caves, sent people to the moon. I wanted to understand how we achieved so much more than any other species ever did. I started asking questions to people around me, most of them told me that God put us on Earth to worship him. That answer didn't sit right with me at all. Why would God create us in the first place? Why do we need to worship him?

Since people around me never had the answers I was looking for, I started digging in private because I refused to believe and worship a God without actual reasoning behind it. Here's what I found — Seven million years ago we shared our last ancestor with chimps. Then something separated us. A forest fragmented, a group got stranded, and evolution did what it always does — it ran its course quietly, over millions of years, until 300,000 years ago something new appeared in Africa. Us. Homo Sapiens. Unimpressive by most measures. But impossibly curious. We lived in Africa for about 230,000 years before a small group of our ancestors decided to explore the world. The human conquest had begun!

Humans walked along the coastline into Arabia to South Asia and eventually reached Australia. The same humans who decided to walk the Earth, somehow ended up in Australia from East Africa. Crazy right? The species that started out living in caves, figured out how to control fire and eventually crossed oceans to reach somewhere unknown. How did they do it? My best guess is from Bamboo rafts and a sense of curiosity and wonder.

This is the same sense of wonder and curiosity that put the first man on the moon thousands of years later. The human species has done things no other species has ever done — we were born on a planet and we left it to explore space. The same moon our ancestors were looking at from Africa, we've stepped on it. That goes to show what curiosity does to mankind. However, even in today's world, there are millions who don't believe in science, who don't believe in what we can achieve. It's not their fault, they were in the same situation I was when I was growing up — the institution that promises care and love shuts down their sense of curiosity and wonder.

No child is born believing the Earth is flat. No child is born believing that we never went to the moon. Their questions get shut down and when the price of asking gets too high, they just give up and conform to the institution. They don't think critically, they stop wondering. This is genuinely concerning and sad. We have probably lost uncountable Einsteins, Curies, Turings to circumstances that never gave them a chance.

Curiosity is what leads humans to do amazing things. We need to encourage curiosity — not shut it down. The institutions that use religion as a platform go against the very thing their founders stood for. The Sufis in Islam, the Kabbalists in Judaism, the Christian contemplatives, the Hindu philosophers — were often the most curious people of their era. Rumi wasn't closing wonder down. He was weaponizing it. His poetry is basically an instruction manual for sitting with cosmic uncertainty and finding it beautiful rather than terrifying.

The Buddha's entire framework started with a question. Not an answer. A question about suffering that he refused to accept inherited explanations for.

What corrupted those traditions wasn't the wondering at their core. It was the institutionalization. The moment any human organization gets big enough, old enough, wealthy enough — it starts optimizing for its own survival over its original purpose. That happens to religions. It happens to universities. It happens to governments. It happens to corporations.

The enemy of curiosity isn't faith. It's institutional power protecting itself.

In a few 100 years, there might be a 14-year-old boy on Mars wondering the same things I wondered at 14 and he'll get shut down. Told to stop wondering. Expected to inherit the answers instead of finding his own.

And he'll keep asking. In private first. Then louder. Then he won't be able to stop. Just like I did and that's the beauty of being curious. You should never give up on being curious, no matter what. The curiosity always finds a way through. It found a way through for every person who ever moved humanity forward. Through institutions, through suppression, through centuries of people being told to stop asking.

If you're reading this, wherever you might be and needed a sign to keep asking questions, to keep wondering — you found it. This is your sign to go do great things. Never give up your sense of awe and wonder just to belong to an institution that doesn't care about you. The world is your oyster and your mind is your greatest tool — use it boldly, use it curiously, and let it take you somewhere no one has gone before.