The world is busy and loud and fast.
And I’ll admit something that might be slightly unpopular in certain corners of the internet: I kind of love that sometimes.
My brain is almost always buzzing with ideas. I enjoy the vibrant hum of an active life—the constant flow of information, the thrill of new tools, the sense that something interesting is always just around the corner.
But you can appreciate that energy and still recognize something intrinsic but easily overlooked: We also need a different gear. A slower one. A more attentive one. A gear where we notice things again.
In the past couple of years, the need for that shift has become even clearer to me, in large part because of the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. The speed at which AI can generate ideas, answers, and content is astonishing. It’s thrilling. It’s also a little unsettling.
Used well, AI has the power to amplify our humanity. But only if we don’t let it replace the habits of mind that make us human in the first place.
Recently I re-read an essay by Ross Douthat from The New York Times titled “An Age of Extinction Is Coming: Here’s How to Survive.” The title isn’t subtle, which might be why I originally left it as an open tab for days on end. Once I did get around to reading it, I printed it out, old fogey that I am. And I read it again. And I’ve returned to it regularly ever since.
Douthat’s message in this essay resonated with me so strongly and immediately that it has become a kind of rallying cry and guiding light. As he considers a future where AI’s capabilities continue to grow geometrically and bring about cascading societal shifts at every level, Douthat doesn’t beat around the bush in naming the stakes: “ Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.”
If we want the things that we love to endure – art, culture, music, movies, history, and human connection as we debate and weave meaning from all of these things – we are going to have to actively work to preserve them. As Douthat writes, “[w]hile this description may sound like pessimism, it’s intended as an exhortation, a call to recognize what’s happening and resist it, to fight for a future where human things and human beings survive and flourish. It’s an appeal for intentionality against drift, for purpose against passivity — and ultimately for life itself against extinction.”
Culture isn’t automatic. It’s maintained. And ultimately, we are all the maintainers.
To be clear, I’m not just talking about “high culture” – fine art and literature and opera and ballet. Culture is also the material culture of everyday life (the things that tell the story of their time). It’s the strange and delightful fragments of mass culture that unexpectedly tie together entire generations. It’s traditions and habits that we share and pass down.
All of it matters because all of it connects us to our humanity.
But culture only lives through our attention. Through our curiosity. Through our willingness to keep asking questions about who we are and where we came from.
And that’s where wonder enters the picture.
Engaging with culture—any culture—begins with curiosity. When we approach the world with curiosity, tools like AI become exactly what they should be: tools. They help us explore ideas faster, connect knowledge more easily, and even create new culture ourselves.
Without curiosity, we risk becoming passive consumers of information rather than active participants in meaning-making.
And that brings us to Museumazing and its mission.
I believe there may be no place on earth that connects us more immediately to the full arc of humanity—and even the arc of life on this planet—than a museum.
Walk through the galleries of almost any museum and you’ll see it. Past and future sitting side by side. High culture and everyday objects sharing the same space. A fossil from millions of years ago just down the hall from a contemporary sculpture made last year.
Museums are time machines, idea laboratories, and storytelling engines all at once.
But most importantly, they are places where curiosity has room to breathe .In a museum, you can stand in front of an object and ask simple but profound questions:
Who made this?
Why did it matter?
What does it say about the people who lived before us?
What does it say about us?
Moments like that stretch our thinking and root us in universal traditions. They make connections across time and across cultures. They invite us to see ourselves as part of a much larger human story.
And something happens when we do that.
We don’t just learn more about the thing we’re curious about. We also learn more about ourselves. And in that process, I believe we become a little more human.
Those moments—when curiosity sparks and perspective widens and something quietly clicks into place—that’s what I call wonder. It’s not about finding an answer, but rather experiencing a moment where you connect to something bigger, almost by surprise.
Museums are wonderful places to experience it. But wonder doesn’t belong only inside museum walls. Once you learn how to notice it, you can carry it anywhere.
You can find it in the design of a teapot. In the story behind a child’s drawing. In the unexpected connections that bubble up between past memories and the present day.
The more we practice noticing those things, the more resilient our curiosity becomes. In a fast-moving world full of powerful new technologies, this might be one of the most important skills we can cultivate.
Because wonder keeps us paying attention. It keeps us open to possibilities. It keeps us asking questions.
Ultimately, it keeps us participating in culture, helping shape and preserve it instead of just drifting through.
And in a fast, loud, distracted world, that might be not only one of the most human things we can do but also one of the most important things we can do for humanity.