Educate Yourself

5 min readFeb 15, 2021

If you build your life only around experiences soon you will find yourself more and more agonising.

Each generation, in his way, believes that it is better than the previous one, Generation X saw the first computers, Generation Y the internet, and Generation Z the smartphones.

People believe that they live now and they are smarter than ever, well, why wouldn’t they, it is their generation who led the world to the future, to the most advanced point it has ever been and therefore deserves the best for itself.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Old Days

But wait, let’s take a step back, how it is all related, anyway, to education? Well, to answer that we have to look at some of the most basic and simple things, and see how we take them for granted.

The bus that took you to work today? invented around the victorian period, and the steam engine before shaped the very first steam buses, which lets everyone in the western world travel economically and much more efficiently the previously to that invention.

The wheels on that bus? they go as early as the copper age. Yep, you do use these simple inventions every day without even knowing, and wouldn't be able to do much of what you do today without them.

The most basic things in our lives are often shaped by our legacy, then why wouldn’t we learn from previous generations? They surely have some interesting inventions we use and will keep using for a period only time could tell. So we shouldn’t be so arrogant and try to rebuild the world to shape like our generation wants to.

Generations are short, and before we notice it our generation will also be replaced by our successors. we should work cross-generations and not rebuild the world to match our vision.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t say there shouldn’t be a room for improvement, I do believe in changes and I do think the world changes, for the better. But sometimes we can learn a lot, and not just from the scientific inventions of our ancestors, but and most importantly their ideas, their philosophy of the world, and their way of having society work together and live, we sometimes forget that they might have their fabric of culture which at-least worth reflecting on.

Experiences

I started my article with experiences, as they make up our life nowadays, with the globalization, especially during the pandemic where the main medium of our life is hosted in the cloud, more and more we become apparent to the FOMO and the YOLO culture, the need to be everywhere at any time and with a huge stream of data that enters our mind in a high traffic rate, without us having the time to digest it.

The way for our happiness should be achieved through the realisation, of whatever will be the thing we love to do, but we start to miss those things once we keep riding the non-stop train.

If anyone was to consider how our life has changed during the last year and a half, I think no one could expect that, and somewhere along the path, we might have lost the most important things, which are in a way to let us gain the things that we should, and let us be ourselves.

In a way, I am somewhat jealous of older generations, who could look and live their life at a slower pace. Some of that time would go to appreciate art, life and culture, yes culture, legacy, all of that thing which nowadays seem like a remote dot in the historical timeline.

While one might say that culture isn’t for him and he thinks the scarce of data in the past, and the slower pace of changes, which in some way shaped more dramatic things, instead of shooting them at a blazing rate, unlike ever seen before, and let the people time to appreciate it, its at-least good to know what was before us, what we already know and how we can proceed.

Right now, the overinflated selection we have which leads to too many options, that we might decide not to choose. I find it very hard to consume media, as the variety is so large I could be missing such good options, that I prefer to keep getting low-quality short content, that was picked by an app rather than take a brave choice by myself.

Sure, one might say why wouldn’t I just consume everything? like literally watching every single show coming out, every single newspaper and well actually every popular content creator on whatever platform. One problem with that, you simply can’t, there is too much content out there sitting to be consumed. We can only try and consume all this information that was picked up for us by some smarter than humanity great big-data AI deep/machine/something-learning algorithm.

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
Socrates

Nevertheless, what good that could bring us? The content is usually what gives us the most “fun” and engages us the most, but that won’t certainly help us, it might be what we like to consume, but it won’t necessarily educate us, nor make our well being better. It will only fill our time and our fear of missing out, but we still couldn't keep up.

My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

From Here

However, I do believe there are things a few we could do:

Release our FOMO:

Hardly ever I hear any good comes out of the FOMO effect, I think once you embrace you can’t live all paths altogether, you will get yourself to a more peaceful place in life, which will help

It’s ok to be individual

You can and should have your own life, your own things you like to do, and your own habits you like. This is one step to start from, yet one that might be hardest for us. We don’t like to be different, and I don’t say you should, I just say that you should live your own life, and try to define yourself by the things you like