A small thanks to the resident Theists..

[Angrboda]

The idea that the search for knowledge is merely to "look like they know more than others," is to make a mockery of all the research that has ever been done. To use a cliché - knowledge is its own reward and, once outside of higher education it is non-competitive.

For reasons I do not know I have a drive to understand things. I spend a huge proportion of my free-time on the net. That divides up between reading the news (particularly anything on the latest scientific advances), watching Youtube videos that explain and review items ranging from the latest mobile phones to the latest theories in physics to new dinosaur discoveries to .... well anything that catches my eye, and then recently on here where I like to discuss and share ideas.

To me this is part and parcel of being human. If that is wrong then being human is wrong and I am happy to be human.

That it is not a science of production is clear even from the history of the earliest philosophers. For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e. g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. And this is confirmed by the facts; for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured, that such knowledge began to be sought. Evidently then we do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage; but as the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake.

— Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982