I been giv­ing some thought lately to my peers’ career choices. Why do fac­ulty choose the dis­ci­plines they do? There are the obvi­ous rea­sons, like self-efficacy. For exam­ple, a physics pro­fes­sor prob­a­bly pur­sued a Ph.D. in physics because she found her­self good at it. An Eng­lish pro­fes­sor may have been hon­ored for his writing.

But I think there’s some­thing else under­ly­ing these choices. Con­sider some of the extremes, such as math­e­mat­ics and phi­los­o­phy, or social work and edu­ca­tion. Is there some­thing about the deter­min­ism of math­e­mat­ics that makes it attrac­tive to cer­tain per­son­al­i­ties? Are there cer­tain types of peo­ple who enjoy rev­el­ing in logic and abstrac­tion? Do these char­ac­ter­is­tics of these areas of thought make peo­ple feel safe some­how? And the more human­i­tar­ian fields: is it dri­ven by a strong desire to exer­cise val­ues and moral­ity? Sci­en­tists are also inter­est­ing: does the search for truth make them feel noble, or is their some­thing trilling about the hunt for explanations?

I sup­pose we all have in com­mon the desire to fill our lives with as much thought as pos­si­ble. Is it insa­tiable curios­ity or just a par­tic­u­larly low thresh­old for amuse­ment? By that I mean we can engage our­selves in the small­est of details in the nat­ural and arti­fi­cial worlds, where as oth­ers, who could care less about research, require a much greater mag­ni­tude of nov­elty to be engaged.