i’ve developed a habit of resisting the urge to look up things i don’t know. and not just random facts like an actor’s age or pop culture reference. useful stuff, too.
on 1 hand i’m always learning, studying, thinking. on the other i challenge myself to survive without technical terms and best practices. this applies to professional and casual tasks, like coding or messing with farm gear.
when asked why i’m like this, i usually provide 1 of 3 reasons pending context.
- It (The Information) doesn’t matter
- “Don’t correct people at a dinner party” (Carnegie)
- Many people suffer from addiction to fact checking even the most insignificant details of a conversation and i’m trying to avoid this disease
objections
#3 is how you start a fight. try mocking a friend who looks up bullsh*t factoids while you’re hanging out. they will defend themselves – “i just enjoy knowing this stuff.” ah yes, and the alcohlic simply loves whiskey.
nobody seems to disagree with #2, except to note that most of life isn’t a social gathering. most of the time nobody is watching you, nobody cares about you, and nobody thinks you’re being rude if you whip out a phone. it’s totally normal.
where i get the most kickback is #1. who’s to say “It” doesn’t matter? and besides, humans can store near infintite information. so knowing random stuff makes us interesting. right?
we learn what we care about
before buying a ranch i didn’t know the difference between a bull vs steer, heifer vs cow. i didn’t know because i didn’t care. but suddenly i owned a few, so i learned.
in 2021 i wanted to understand the crypto hype so i learned Solidity, built dozens of smart contracts, started a Web3 agency in Korea (cringe), and sold out multiple NFTs. i learned because i cared.
but this is how information is acquired in a rational, efficient universe. our universe is inverted.
we care about what we learn
some days everything is going fine until you hear about a school shooting. you didn’t know any of this, you didn’t care, but now you do.
this rule touches everything, from political news to family drama and small town crime.
now let’s suppose a best case scenario. that these facts enter your brain and are organized in limitless storage bins. it sounds great until we acknowledge the hidden cost. i codify this as Care.
if you tell me Tom Cruise is only 5 foot 5 inches, i start to wonder how they make him look normal height in scenes with bigger actors. then i care about this movie magic effect. and by the way how tall is that chick who plays his wife? today’s Care: deducted by 1 point.
infinite storage, finite Care
at my peak Korean study schedule i learned ~25 new words per day. i picked up 1000s of words in my first year, including stuff i’ve never needed to know like ennui (권태기).
i didn’t stop at 25 because my brain couldn’t handle more. i stopped because my brain didn’t care. try using 25 new words tonight between dinner and bed time.
learning because We Can ignores our most important limiting function — our slow-to-refill supply of attention and the requisite behaviors (energy) necessary to assist our attention’s current target.
another approach to Googling things
before looking up a dumb (or useful) piece of information, ask yourself if you want to care about that information tomorrow, the next day, and a year after.
i’ll go first and admit i’ve heard the words “Docker” and “Kubernetes” 100s of times since learning to code. i’m curious what these words mean. but i care about my health, my family, and my future. so for now, i won’t be looking them up.
intentional ignorance is wisdom. steward your Care.
Most people have a wild inability to control 1) what enters their attention field and 2) what thoughts dominate (hence the wellspring of antidepressants, therapists, meditation, etc– all fine things potentially in isolation, but far overused and a symptom of a larger cultural illness.
A person’s quality of life/success can usually be 1:1 correlated to how they manage those two levers, and the former is particularly under-appreciated. But it’s also why every CEO in the universe doesn’t answer his/her own phones. My phone is on silent most of the time and my doorbell chime is disconnected. Unsolicited inbounds are the bane of existence. Most people never understand this and assume the opposite: more access, more info = more humanity. No, the opposite.
The study of memetics is helpful for the latter point. Ideas spread. They are quite like mind viruses. And like a diseased body that is more prone to illness, a diseased mind is prone to mind viruses. It is not kept supple and healthy to push out unwelcomed guests. Like the point about Tom Cruise, can we help ourselves from caring? We need those control levers.
(Notably, I am only caring about this because I got an email about it. Like many of Ryan’s notices, I tend to open them quickly and enjoy the “mind viruses” he spreads. Is that to my benefit? I suppose the results are only evident later– but I’m willing to take a bet on it, knowing its an imperfect calculus and the cons appear to be outweighed by the benefits. As always, I will continue to evaluate that. For now tho, Ryan’s emails remain one of the few subscriptions I allow. Everything else tends to get culled with extreme prejudice.)
i wrote a sentence about memetics, then deleted it because i don’t want to send people down a rabbit hole of things they shouldn’t care about.
Which is why you are wise beyond your years. :-) I thought about it too– very “inside baseball” indeed, but figured I explained enough of it that people would get the gist. I also can’t/won’t control what rabbit holes people choose to go down. Call it a test of their will, perhaps. I only brought it up to note it’s not just something I came up with. Presumably I could have squared that circle by merely saying that such a field exists but declined to name it. Oh well. :-)
rule no. 1: save your attention bullets for deserving targets