Jargogled Impressions.

A student for life. A term that I see people increasingly associating themselves with. From what I can gather, its an admission of the urge to continuously learn new things, to challenge ourselves with new domains, new mindsets, new ideas. There’s a flux in this state that attracts them.
Also, the age they are at.
As we age, our propensity to learn and to adopt ourselves shift measurably even if we refuse to believe it. This isn’t something biological as much as it is environmental. We build those accoutrements around us that prevent us from constantly focusing on learning. Our desires and expectations of off us deliver us to a station where driving towards outcomes make more sense than continuously driving. If we are not getting somewhere, our time and our attention are too scarce to focus on the matter at hand. A desire to focus more on outcomes versus experiences also leads us down the path of finding our own zones of comfort.
My relationship with reading fiction went through this transition and found itself succumbing to the insistent demands. While sci-fi surfaced as a new unlikely candidate from the ashes, my shift towards adulthood was complete. 🙂
Now I find myself wondering why.
Learning new things has its charm. It keeps us on our toes and lets our imaginations run its course. But this pleasure comes at a cost. Every new thing you pick up to learn, you are effectively saying no to 100 other new things as well as downgrading some existing ones to oblivion. There’s a choice you are inherently making due to the mortal nature of our existence.
There are too many good books in this world for a lifetime. So every book that I pick up is a choice I am making on not choosing another. There are too many new technologies striving to be the most revolutionary of our generation. Web3, AI, Quantum, deep-space, etc. What should you learn is as much an everyday choice as when you should bathe as learning is never a one and done deal. Learning needs to be continuous, and it needs to be alive and kicking. Else what you learn would be superficial and semantics at best.
Learning for some is like a sport. These good souls find something competitive about being aware of things. Like those quizzers I used to envy in college. The numerous arcane facts and tidbits that attract these ardent folks intrigue me. I have tried and failed at being interested in quizzes. Much as I have tried and failed at being interested in crosswords. But an underlying current of desire remains, for it appears as one of the better ways to understand the world. Understanding is a big word – and one cannot really “understand” anything just by parroting the facts or remembering the etymology. But who really understands anything anyways.
Learning requires a different mindset, especially when there are no externally imposed goals, or the outcomes are not clearly defined. It’s easy to fall prey to thinking that learning should be easy (I will learn what is naturally appealing to me), that it should be natural (I will learn from people who I like and relate to), that learning should be for the popular topics (I should only learn machine learning!), that learning is a means to control things (I learn so I can change things around me), that learning should not be uncomfortable (I am not interested in learning about racial biases of Indians). But learning requires a shift in mindset that lets you open up to the world around you, in a semi-hysterical state where everything is interesting and inter-connected.
I have found the best way to learn is to incorporate the habit as an identity (hence the popularity of the term “student for life”) and becoming more open and spongier in our interactions with the world around us. Cheesy movie dialogues say everyone has something to teach someone else and I couldn’t agree more. Much as a book is what the reader makes of it, the world is what we as living things make of it. Climbing up the learning curve for any particular area requires patience and a mellowed view of what know and what we don’t. Learning is an intensely humbling experience as going deeper into any topic is similar to probing the deeper recesses of space – the deeper you go, the more you realize the expanse of the knowledge that exists beyond your reach.
As Mark Twain quipped: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
That is, as you go about learning new things, ensure unlearning is part of the process and the two are inextricably linked. Chase new learning opportunities for the sheer pleasure of learning, of discovering new vistas of understanding. There are plenty of areas that I want to learn more about, across a bunch of study areas. But none seem to serve any purpose other than to satisfy my thirst for “that’s interesting!”. Does chasing interesting stuff get you anywhere if there’s no single line connecting them? Or should we just assume the thread the kneads them is the thread of our life?
If you look at biographies of famous people – Da Vinci, Bach, Vivaldi, Godel, etc. you get the impression that chasing curiosity is likely going to reap you the most asymmetric rewards. The inspiration, or the Ctulhu, strikes you sometimes in the most inopportune times, but these times are not pure blind luck – these opportunities arise as a result of preparation and hard work. You prepare yourself through hard work – of learning new things, of applying new learnings – to be ready when such inspirations strike. And inspirations are mostly diverse in their origins – as in, they come to you when you expose yourself to environments, studies, domains, that are outside your zone of comfort.
I have a thing against comfort zones. A fact that has led my career into winding curves and blind alleys so far. I also feel hard work is the one ethical principle that is universal. But hard work does not stand by itself and without direction or the connecting tissue/thread, effort seems one of Sisyphean make.

Learn to make learning an outcome, a destination, and not just the journey. Or better still, learn to enjoy the journey regardless of the destination.