A day without learning is like a day without using the crapper. The mental constipation makes you feel dumber than a kakapo climbing a tree.
Learning helps life flourish. It cannot be reduced to a garbage eating contest. BuzzFeed already won that. Learning now has become about information. And to rant about information overload on a blog is like getting high and talking about the opioid crisis. So here’s all I have on the topic: Information is to learning what the newspaper is to your pet cockatoo. As you can tell by now, my information diet is low carb and involves parrots and poop, mostly.
The recent obsession with learning has nothing to do with curiosity. What excites us about learning now is it offers an exciting reprieve from our unending stupidity. It’s a quickie for the head. In the Internet, curiosity found El Chapo.
Being learned now means superimposing your shitty experience and shallow knowledge on everything. It’s re-branding the past and believing you are re-defining the future. You know you have no sense of history the moment you begin to believe you can control the future. You would think the pandemic must’ve been a giant middle finger to all that, but then people started making predictions about the pandemic. I hope they all get their dicks bitten off by a Macaw.
You know you are learning wrong when knowledge is making you narrow; when you are increasingly becoming cocksure about what is right.
Being learned used to mean being wise. You sought the counsel of the wise not because they knew it all, but because they didn’t let their knowledge get in the way of learning. It’s why instead of giving us a solution, they helped us understand the problem better.
The closest thing we have to wisdom now is a recovering alcoholic half-horse half-man named BoJack Horseman. Tell me if you’ve heard a better summary of love: “You Didn’t Know Me And Then You Fell In Love With Me And Now You Know Me.” BoJack for President.
Learning is not comfort-food for your mistakes. There’s this quip about how you should avoid making the same mistake again, but it misses the point: you can learn something else entirely when you make the same mistake again, the greatest of which is, this time, it actually worked. To be open to this mystery is curiosity.
Learning isn’t competition. Speed-reading is for Ullu Ka Pattha’s.
Learning is effective when you can change your mind. When knowledge doesn’t fossilize your brain and make you believe you are making new mistakes when, really, it’s the same mistake covered in the parrot poop of self-righteousness. Learning’s not an exercise in intellect, but in empathy. Ignorance is bliss not because your idea of pleasure is eating factory-farmed animals from a bucket.
The bliss of ignorance is knowing so much that the one thing you know for sure is that you know nothing but you continue learning anyway.
Meditations 