24Oct19 | Knowledge is continuous

Knowledge doesn’t have a goal. You cannot reverse engineer it.

A goal is something you want to do, not something you want to be.

And because knowledge is continuous, there isn’t an end destination.

You don’t ever stop knowing. Just like you do not ever stop being.

You continue to be in a state of knowing, as long as you are.

Years ago my professor once told me, in order to be ‘something’, you have to know about ‘everything’.

I then learned that knowledge is an infinite spectrum, and whatever topics I choose to know are just droplets in an ocean.

Years later I started following my curiosity.

21-yr old me was not having a problem remembering everything he knew.

23-yr old me was not having a problem remembering everything he knew.

25-yr old me started feeling some discomfort, couldn’t remember some things he knew.

27-yr old me started feeling real pain.

When I was 25, this was around 2020/21.

For anyone paying close attention, many things changed during 2020, particularly:

• we’re feeling time is passing much faster than it was
• our attention span became much shorter than it was
• focus became an increasingly scarce resource than it was

but why is that?

1. The introduction of Instagram reels in 2020 (there was no reels or short-form videos in 2019)
2. You had more time to yourself than you used to have, so every single type of distraction was suddenly on the table

So slowly we started experiencing the side effect of having all the options all the time.

Optionality is a devil. When you feel like everything is possible at 100% of the time, the door for analysis paralysis and information fatigue is always open. When we believe we’re capable of doing anything, talking to anyone, going anywhere, and achieving any goal, at any time, our monkey brain prioritizes instant idleness because we think we got all the time we need.

More this feeling kicks in, the more we cannot exit the loop. Because now we don’t even have the time needed to act upon an idea we find before finding another one.

It’s not just on the level of high-level ideas, it’s also true on the level of “thoughts”! It’s actually horrifying what I’m about to say; we now seem prone to forget every simple floating thought way before we’re able to accumulate or connect or hold on to it. Before we know what to do with a thought, whether turn it into an action, a decision, a say, or an idea, we’re constantly bombarded with stimulants that trigger a number of other thoughts that may or may not be related.

And this is infuriating because thoughts need time to form!

So as I grow up, two things continue to happen:

1. Distractions are increasing, in fact intensifying
2. I’m consuming way more knowledge than before, due to honing in on my interests and curiosities that shaped up with age

So the rate of consumption became much higher than the rate of retention.

I can keep going, but then acquiring new knowledge from now on will always feel like filling a cracked container with water.

This resulted not only in information fatigue, but a complete halt.

If I don’t take a stop now, nothing makes sense, and nothing ever will.

When I track back my original intrigue in topics like knowledge management, calm minds, and second brains, it’s because I aligned with those concepts out of need rather than sheer interest.

Thanks for reading!