By motomynd
When is the time to stop learning, and instead start sharing the knowledge of a lifetime, no matter if lived well or not? At some point, cramming more information into a fading brain so you can take it to the great beyond, makes as little sense as buying countless diamonds so you can have them sprinkled in your casket and buried with you.
People are in favor of, and congratulated for, creating wills and trusts to disseminate the estates they leave behind. So why are they in favor of, and applauded for, going back to college at age 85, or reading a book a day at age 90, instead of putting that time and energy into teaching others? At some point, gaining more knowledge, instead of sharing it, is as pointless and self-indulgent as earning extra money so one can burn it.
If you wish to read for pleasure–while taking a break from sharing mega-doses of knowledge–sure, have at it. But isn’t it time to give up the delusion you are going to “learn it all” before you go?
The problem is, how does one know when to stop learning and start sharing? And how does one objectively establish they have something worth sharing? Some people learn and accomplish so much by age 30 they should probably stop right there and share the wealth. Others have as pathetically little to offer at age 75, as they did at 15, yet they too have a message to deliver to the young—even if it is only “don’t be like me.”
The answer to the question of when to share, and when to just keep on reading, obviously varies from person to person. We can only hope people are willing to take a hard look in the mirror and answer it realistically.
A stumbling block in this process is that very smart people who lack formal education often underestimate the knowledge they have to share, and people with much education often overestimate their wisdom.
When did that happen anyway? When did society start over-valuing education and under-valuing intelligence? When came the leap that put a premium on reading and discounted the value of thinking?
Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan didn’t overcome adversaries by reading about their armaments and battle techniques; they overcame by thinking and creating better weapons and tactics.
From Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the intelligent create new technology and industry, and the educated work for them. Yet we live in a society that pushes degrees as fervently as drug cartels traffic cocaine, rather than promoting thought-based innovation and intelligence: Why is that?
One would think that even the briefest look at our Wall Street scandals and political ineptitude would prove there is no link between degrees and intelligence, but few people seem to see the obvious. If you study the ups and downs of Ford, Apple, Microsoft, and others like them, their downturns are generally caused by having too much payroll wasted on employees well-educated in what the company does, and not enough invested in people who are thinking about what they need to next.
Looking at it objectively, the prejudice that favors formally educated over intelligent is arguably leagues worse than the one that favors one person over another on the basis of skin color or ethnicity; it hamstrings development of our society in general and our commerce in particular.
“Young people just won’t listen” is one cop-out that many older people use in explaining why they don’t share their lifetime of wisdom with younger generations. If you are decades older than the person to whom you are speaking or writing, you have therefore had 30, 40, 50 or more years to learn how to communicate effectively. If you can’t find a way to get them to listen, where is the real problem? If you have lived 70 years, worked a successful career for four decades, and can’t get a 12-year-old to pay attention, then you need to take a long hard look in the mirror and sort out what is wrong with you.
Was your career success based in thinking and innovating, or was it rooted in degrees and certificates earned, and in not ruffling the feathers of your superiors? Reality check here, sorry, but it just may be that your success is limited to career and finances, and a 12-year-old won’t listen because they intuitively know you have nothing of real value to share. Up until 2006 one had to be incredibly unlucky or something of a dolt not to have a successful career. Earning a degree and paying the bills is important, sure, but you don’t earn gold stars for doing what just about everyone else is doing. It is difficult to get on the good side of those struggling to survive after the ship ran aground, if you were one of the folks on the bridge when it hit the rocks.
If you just can’t speak the language of the young, and you lament they only pay attention to what is online, then build a website to share your knowledge. Not Facebook—a real website. You don’t know how? Seriously? There are dozens if not hundreds of companies that provide easy-to-use, drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG website design. You don’t even have to learn HTML, like you did way back in the 20th century dark ages of the web.
Do you understand why Facebook is so popular? Just about anyone able to log onto the internet can build a FB site. It is that simple and idiot-proof. Problem is, that means it attracts a lot of idiot simpletons, and you have to sort through mountains of proverbial chaff to find the figurative wheat. So if you want to share the wealth that is your lifetime of knowledge, read just enough to learn how to build your own website, add the proper meta tags and key words, and start typing. Even if your young target audience isn’t impressed with what you have to say, they will be shamed into having to learn to build their own websites so they can keep up. That is at least a bit of knowledge and motivation shared right there.
On the other hand, if you are so out of touch with modern reality you have no clue what WYSIWYG means, and you don’t know how to find out in a couple of clicks, maybe you should just keep on reading and being that elder the kids ignore. It just may be your 20th century career success was based on timing and perseverance, instead of aptitude and evolution. If “count on luck and doggedness” is the only motivating message you have for today’s generations, you may want to keep that to yourself, instead of reminding them you helped beach their boat in the first place.
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Copyright © 2013 by motomynd
| Please comment |
I've been wondering what I was going to do with that bag of diamonds I've been saving. It would be a way to get a lot of people to your funeral. I'm sure more than one would fall down crying over your body.
ReplyDeleteSome of what you have said Moto, I agree with---although not quiet as strongly as you have stated it.
I've found that kids before the age of 12, will listen and in most cases enjoy the attention. However, after 12 you become limited on subject matter that interest them. They roam with their own herd, until about mid-twenties, then they are ready to listen again.
I cannot count the number of times my daughter came to me and said, "You were right, dad." So I found that sharing will make you right, but the child wants to learn that on their own.
As for reading, hell, I write books which I know no one will read but myself. Why, because I want to find out how they end. You jump on you bike, because you love the feeling of the wind rushing pass. Some people read, not so much to learn, but to enjoy. I believe that is why most people do things that have little value to someone else. We all seek a little enjoyment in our life.
I read to learn, because learning stuff is fun, not because I expect to change the world. I practice music because learning to make music is fun. (And because I'm looking for Nirvana.) I wrote software for the Nature Conservancy, and taught and managed for the Mountain Club, and joined CORE, to Do Good. I've done my turn at doing good, I'm looking for fun.
DeleteAs for sharing my wisdom with the world, I find reading the comments following columns in the NYT to be a sobering reality check. Even for those who clearly know what they're talking about, NOBODY IS LISTENING. Stipulating that I have wisdom worth sharing (doubtful), I can at best preach to the choir. Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one, and nobody wants to look at the other guy's.
Here is a piece of wisdom from the era and social class I grew up in: to earn enough money to feed and house a family is just barely possible. If you have that dream, you're going to have to forget the others.
A slightly different way to put it: you can have a great family life, a great job, and a great hobby. Pick any two.
Good stuff, Chuck. However, I believe that if one spends most of their time thinking their way through life, rather than devoting most of their time to reading how others thought their way through life, they can pick all three: a great family life, a great job, and a great hobby.
DeleteChuck - I like you description of "Opinions". I would add that it's not not looking a other peoples opinions that gets you into trouble, it's blindly believing them when you do....
DeleteOkay kono, you have me on this one. I tried the translate button and that didn't even help, doesn't seem to be a translation for "boomer speak." I know you to be man of profound thought with independent views that often separate you from the flock "baaahhhhing" around you. You even had sense enough to leave the country. I also know you as someone who will write something just to get a rise out of someone else, and I am often the victim. I am assuming your post, which could be titled "the aging boomer perspective problem in microcosm," is meant as a prank, but I will rise to the bait anyway. For some reason I am already beginning to feel like a fat carp flopping on a red clay bank gasping for air...
ReplyDeleteYes, some kids veer radically away from their parents at age 12 or in their early teens. But a sizable percentage don't. My hypothesis is the difference isn't in the teens, but rather in the parents. At age 12 or 13 most kids are savvy enough to pick up on the fact that most parents are living lives that are a lie at several levels, that they have given up their dreams, and life is controlling them, instead of them controlling life. So kids with those kind of parents instinctively know to get away, so they hopefully don't end up like that. The kids with parents who have it together tend to stay close.
And yes, most kids eventually think mom and dad were right after all. But is that because mom and dad were right? Or is it just because the kids are now in their 20s or 30s and they too have given up on their dreams and are living lives of sad compromise? My hypothesis says it is the latter case.
Yes, we all seek a little enjoyment in life. The problem is that there is a post WWII age group that had an easy, great life handed to them just because they happened to be born at the right time, and they have never seemed to be able to find enough enjoyment. Thanks to the timing of their lives, they had opportunity to build on what was given and make the world great for all - but they instead mostly concentrated on making it great for them. And they still do. I have no issue with people having fun some of the time and being responsible some of the time; I just have a problem with the ratio of give versus take at which most people live.
When you say don't give up on your dreams, it sounds more like 1960s back to the earth-movement-hippie. You also seem to have forgotten the Vietnam war, civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi, 1968 in Chicago, the weathermen, S.L.A., the two Kennedy's and Martin being murdered, Kent State and I could go, but I believe you see where I heading. If any generation had it easy it was yours. What great social change does your generation lay claim to, which allows you to call out mine. Sure maybe, you believe we should keep up the good fight, but where are all your people. I have yet to see police with clubs beating the hell out of kids, since my lazy, do nothing, generation took to the streets.
ReplyDeleteYou say we should share what we have learned, here is one for you: "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight." {Smiley face, with maybe a little laugh}
All of us respect the "boomer minority" who made an effort. The problem is with the "boomer majority" that did not. If you are part of the 10% or so of your generation who took up the good fight, good for you. And no wonder you left the country.
ReplyDeleteFor the rest of us, our beef is with the 90% who took their secure jobs and never made a stand against anything so they wouldn't risk them; those who ignored their children in favor of TV, movies, country clubs and drinking time with their buddies; who refused to pay a penny more for anything if they could avoid it, which destroyed the unions, undermined our educational system, gave us factory farms, and created pollution that won't be cleaned up for generations to come.
As for my generation (age group actually, since we are technically in the same generation) we have made a little progress with social causes, world involvement, technological advances, and so on. Our problem is that just about every time we try to take anything major in a positive direction, we are outvoted by the boomer majority - which gave us eight years of Reagan, 12 years of Bush and Bush, more wars than we can count, and a collapsed economy.
Yes, a small part of your age group did some good things, mostly way back when, but at least they did something. It would be a nice gesture, however, if the majority of that era would step up and do something while they still can. Even if it is nothing more than to finally be honest with themselves and tell today's younger generations "don't be like us."
When you next visit the states let me know where to show up for the duel with my Scottish Claymore. (smile)
The Great Generation took your advice and shared their beliefs with their children and 90% of them thought the other 10% of us were tearing the country apart.And like their parents they believed if we didn't like it, we should leave.
ReplyDeleteThat is the problem with sharing, who do you trust to advise your kids---few would pick someone like me.
You and I share most of the same ideas about the world. But I fought that battle, both from the outside and the inside. The one answer I came away with is this: If you want something to change, find out who is making the money with things the way they are; then make it cost them to much money to not change. It is about the money, it was then, it is now, and it'll be tomorrow. If you can't move their bottom line down; all the protest in the world will not change anything.
kono, I absolutely agree about following the money to figure out how to create change. I also maintain people are more likely to manage that by thinking creatively on their own, than by reading and listening to the dogma spewed by those who write and teach for those who hold the money. Propaganda is the problem; independent thinking is the cure.
DeleteI have my reservations about entering this intellectual fray, but I do find the opinions expressed both intriguing and provocative enough to intrigue me.
ReplyDeleteI generally don't buy much of any generalization broadly stated, or one that leads to conclusions I find unsympathetic. One that elevates Genghis Khan as a model does seem a bit dubious to me. As a person, admittedly, who has spent most of his observable life reading books, teaching books, and occasionally trying to write books, it's hard to find appealing an attack on education or those who are educated, per se. Sure there's Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who dropped out of higher ed to found corporate empires and even change our lives. But there's also Einstein and James Joyce who had superior educations, of various sorts, and used and built on what they knew to alter our world. Not mention milliions of other educated persons, including doctors, physicists, engineers, accountants, military men, on whom the modern world depends--including both Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. Education doesn't guarantee success or wisdom or riches or moral superiority, but it's far ahead, for me at least, statistically, of any other socially and institutionally available alternative. Besides Gates and Jobs, there are tons of, at least American, college dropouts whose lives petered out along that course. Nevertheless, in any individual case (as opposed to the broad generalization), the persons should consider individual prospects and talents.
I also think Alexander the Great was educated, at least part time, by Aristotle, and his empire, vast as it was, just didn't have lasting power. You could also argue, of course, that Einstein didn't pursue the typical course of education, and came to his brilliant insights in the privacy of his own mind in the Swiss patent office, after university education in physics.
The banking and spending model of wisdom connected to age also gives me pause, since it encourages someone who might want to read a book not to, if he or she is over, say, 85. Which dismisses the pleasure and enjoyment, maybe just for that one person, of reading that book. You wouldn't tell someone not to listen to a piece of music or look at a painting after a certain age because that someone wouldn't be sharing it with anyone else. Which isn't to say that being willing to share or offer advice as you grow older is not a positive thing. But I doubt there's a useful rule here.
As to how to deal with 12 year olds. Well, most of us were 12 years old once, and whose to say how best to get to us then? Do you have to be 15, 20, 50, 70, or just interested in 12yearold issues, or that 12yearold's issues? Some of which, of course, can be inane or inordinately time-consuming. By the way I myself admit to being 12 years old once, and raising a 12 year old, for a year.
The other problem with the argument, so far as stated, seems to ignore the multitude hidden benefits of education, aside from strict learning, including induction into culture, socialization, manners, and the learned behaviors of one's peers, as opposed to one's parents or elders. Dropping out misses on some of these.
Anon, for someone hesitant to enter this intellectual fray, as you put it, you came in swinging a fairly stout club. Well done. You offer such keen insights I won't even argue with most of them, for much is opinion, on your side and mine.
ReplyDeleteThe one point I will key on is your last paragraph, where you say the "problem" with my argument is it ignores the hidden benefits of education. To that I would say the problem is that education is designed to create good citizens, not great thinkers, as a several times NYC teacher of the year once told me. It is indeed designed to induct someone into our culture, and teach them their role in our society. Raising a child in an alternative educational environment, or having them drop out before college finishes the molding (i.e. breaking) that elementary school started, saves a child from our version of the caste system, and sets them free to create an independent life.
On this I have to agree with Moto. The best teacher I had was in the 7th grade. She taught American History---she never opened a book all year. The one thing I walked away with was a saying she had: "Never trust everything you read in a book, only the winner of the war writes them."
ReplyDeleteThis however, is my best argument for reading. To think for yourself, you first need some facts to base that thinking on. Even if those facts are wrong, it allows for disagreement and free thinking---if one so chooses.