First, On a Shallow Level.
short answer: because you’re expecting a transaction instead of actively engaging yourself with the idea or knowledge. What you need to change is not the method – is your perception.
A great example of people’s tendency in viewing learning as an act of transfer can be seen through purchasing of online courses that come in the form of videos and materials. This isn’t always true – some purchases are made out of other reasons. But I want to focus on what seems to be the most common form.
A very interesting notion that I have seen is “read more and become smarter”. Before we start, let me define the word “smart” as both the amount of knowledge and the capability in thinking. I do understand the sentimental nature of such statement and at first glance, it seems to be true. But what we get wrong about this statement is that, in my opinion, the statement should be a description and not an instruction. It is generally observed that those who demonstrate more intellectual capability tend to have a higher amount of reading done in their lives and vice versa. But thinking that reading makes you smarter merely based off of this observation (though not always true) is almost like saying that if you buy five houses you will become rich. The paradox is that rich people do frequently have many houses and it seems that they do generate wealth from it but it’d be quite presumptuous of us to assume that the very act of purchase is what made them rich. Back to the books, the very act of reading will enable you to be in the proximity of ideas in the form of texts, but it does not mean that you will be absorbing them (under the hypothesis that the absorption is a huge contributor to one’s intellectual development). knowledge, information or whatever it is that you’d call – isn’t collected like stones on mountains or shells by the oceans. They are nuances that I don’t know how we process and store them. In order to be able to read a book (though also depends on genre and my statements are very generalizing) you not only need some level of prior knowledge that would support you well through the whole book, there are other factors such as emotions or, as I’d like to call, mental atmosphere. Thus the very act of raw dogging books isn’t as effective in practice.
Let me demonstrate the importance on the idea of mental atmosphere here. Imagine a philosopher makes a point that categorizes the other philosophers. You as the reader, when read that sentence, the sentence isn’t particularly hard to grasp: 20 different philosophers into three different categories. But the mental atmosphere can vary: a) you are now aware of the fact that such categorization exists and stop there, you have no understanding of the philosophers mentioned and you are not able to tell apart which philosopher is in which category by reading their works b) you are capable of all the incapabilities mentioned above. Two people reading the same sentence on the same book is possible to have two entirely different mental atmosphere. This very much proves the possibility of the separation of one’s intellectual development or engagement from the very act of reading itself. This divorce isn’t necessarily a revolutionary insight but it seems to be the foundation to the common misconception that people have.
Another mistake people make is blind acceptance of what they read. This is usually deemed as a matter of critical thinking. But I think it really has to do with the mental atmosphere. However, the phenomena would be the frequent “what have you learned from that book?” kind of question – The question itself very much assumes that we are bound to “learn” a set of things from the book. It is not false, but it bases itself on the idea of seeing books as a valid source of information with no specific evidence – and this is again, the notion or understanding that people have on the act of reading as a transaction.
So, should you read? no, definitely not for the conventionally told reasons. Then what? Fix your atmosphere. The first step is to accept the radical skepticism. Question everything you have learned, from the social norms and the things you have as habits. At the bottom of the rabbit hole, you are able to see the lack of reasonings to a lot of things. And that lack of reasoning, will prompt you towards the things that tickles your curiosity – that is when you actually do engage with the knowledges.
if the last paragraph where I give you the instruction sounds confusing, keep reading. I will explain.
Now, if You think being smart is a real thing
Another problem associated with this phenomena is our failure in recognizing and labeling things as positive or negative. knowing what’s in the books, or acquiring those knowledges should not be translated as positive let alone the act of reading itself (yeah look at yourself blindly taking in everything from a book and always using them as a reference).
We do not have a foundation or clear reasonings behind why we read, what to read or what we are to do with the things we get told from the book. Our understanding on what’s being said in the book, compared to the author’s actual intention, in my unverified opinion, is usually far off.
We live in a society where we pathetically compare ourselves to others, it’s a doxa. You are conditioned to do so. And that very desire to achieve the superiority has sipped into the field of knowledge and thinking. Thus the positive labels we often associate with acts that we demonstrate that somehow without any evidence seem to be linked to the state of being on the top of that smart scale.
Smart, is not a real thing.
Thus being smart is a total bullshit.
You feel insecure and miserable because you are chasing after a make believe that is fundamentally a total pile of shit. a single pile of your feces deserves more attention than that belief that we were taught to have.
So how shall we live?
First, stop validating the superiority that comes from the state of being “smart”. The earlier definition that hinged on the amount of information and the capability in processing is also a bullshit crude example to first disentangle the messy and unverified notions we have about the act of reading. Now we need to get deeper. To stop that validation is to deny the validity in how we define smartness and to throw away the concept of it entirely. There’s no such thing as a smart person or a dumb person, those are the words we call out when we experience emotions towards others or ourselves. Now this is to stop you from chasing the idea of being “smart”.
Chance of me having convinced by far is lower than the chance of me ever getting a girl. We can do better than that, so let me continue.
matter of attention. the final ground.
Now, to further explain why being smart isn’t a real thing, we have to look into the act of calling something real. I will give the definition, we call something real when we think that thing has significance (no matter where the threshold is) to our lives. This is to say that when something is real, our acknowledgment of the existence of that something, is fundamentally our decision to spare our attentions on it.
This is to say that your belief in the “smartness” – all the positive labels and recognitions of it as an absolute necessity, etc. has zero ground. You only do so because you live in this society where it matters to believe in it. Try to explain why smartness matters and listen to yourself giving the same answers again and again only to just describe the positive sounding things about it such as going far in life or being liked by people but try to apply it to yourself and then you will see how unrealistic it actually is.
The easiest thing, with what is being discussed here in the last chapter, is to now see what you would actually like to spare your attentions on. Why do you feel the need to be smart? What is lacking? You likely believe that the act of reading will eventually give you a meaningful impact. But if you can’t explain exactly what, then maybe you’ve just made a meaningful step towards where I want you to be.
Your life is limited, and you have the all the rights in the world to give yourself a chance to be true to yourself and experience life with genuine curiosity instead of living under the residue and products of constructed beliefs that our society has produced.
Rebel 