Curiosity - A gift and a curse

Ah curiosity! How it irks me!  Sometimes it drives me forward. My need to satisfy my insatiable curiosity gives me a drive to progress.  However, when my curiosity arouses in an area that could bear no fruition it sets me on the edge of insanity.  I don't know how many others are controlled by their curiosity as much as I am, but it consumes my thoughts and "what consumes your thoughts controls your life." (Creed "What If").  Anyway... -rant over-  Now to throw in a bit of my Mythology fascination.  According to the Greeks this is what happened to mankind when curiosity was gifted to a young woman.

The story of Pandora and her jar of miseries begins with the Titan Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and gifting it to mortals for their progression.  Infuriated, Zeus punished Prometheus by binding him to a rock.  Everyday an eagle visits Prometheus and feasts on his liver and every night it grows back. This continues on everyday until later, Heracles kills the fowl and releases the Titan.  After punishing Prometheus Zeus had to punish mankind.  To do so Zeus had Hephaestus, the smith god, to create the first woman, a "beautiful evil" whose descendants would torment the race of men.  She was given the name Pandora meaning "one who gives all gifts."  In addition to being created by Hephaestus, Athena and Aphrodite dressed her in a silvery gown, an embroidered veil, garlands and an ornate crown of gold.  After her creation Zeus gave her to Epimetheus, Prometheus's brother, as a wife.  When she first appears before gods and mortals, "wonder seized them" as they looked upon her. But she was "sheer guile, not to be withstood by men." (Theogony by Hesiod).  At the wedding of Epimetheus and Pandora the young bride was given the gift of a sealed jar by Zeus and the gift of curiosity by Hera (in a few versions it is just said she is created with curiosity and others it is given by Zeus).  She is instructed by Zeus to not open the jar under any circumstances.  The newlyweds go down from Olympus to live among men.  Pandora resists the jar for a time but in the end the curiosity overcomes her.  She opens the jar and a "burdensome toil and sickness that brings death to men," disease, and "a myriad other pains" are released on mankind (Works and Days by Hesiod).  Pandora stops up the jar again but not before the miseries have escaped into the world.  In some versions hope is released as well and in others it remains trapped in the jar.  This is the most pessimistic reading possible for the myth. A less pessimistic interpretation (still pessimistic, to be sure) understands the myth to say: countless evils fled Pandora's jar and plague human existence; the hope that we might be able to master these evils remains imprisoned inside the jar. Life is not hopeless, but each of us is hopelessly human.  

Even in ancient times curiosity was a gift and a curse (a gift because without opposition and misery we could never know true joy and happiness).