I appreciate the spirit of this essay, but I think it overstates the idea that intellectual pursuits are an escape from modern dissatisfaction. I've spent most of my life driven by curiosity, forming my identity around being someone who seeks knowledge. But over time I’ve come to see how that, too, can become a kind of consumerism—chasing ideas for the dopamine hit of a new insight, then feeling the letdown and scrambling for the next one.
The essay frames an intellectually rich life as a kind of antidote to consumer culture, but for me it often mirrors the same patterns: FOMO, compulsiveness, neglect of relationships, a deep anxiety that I’ll never learn enough. The awareness that I’ll only ever scratch the surface of all there is to know has become a source of existential stress, not peace.
This isn’t to say intellectual life isn’t meaningful—but it's not a cure-all. It can be just as prone to distortion as anything else if pursued as a form of escape.
One of the most profoundly simple and true aspects of philosophy that I’ve learned is that without putting it into practice, it’s worthless. It can even be harmful. Although it’s so simple, it’s also one of the most difficult components of philosophy. For me, at least.
I realize more every year how I’ve failed to put what I’ve learned and thought about into practice. It’s dangerously easy to sandbox your intellectual life within your brain, where your ability to reason and navigate your inner world seems deceptively good at times. And that’s an important skill too, of course. But humans are innately social creatures and these skills are next to useless if they don’t also work effectively and reliably around other people, where you don’t control the environment, you don’t control the topic or direction or tone or whatever it might be.
If that obsession with learning the next thing manifests as an ostensibly rich inner world, you will inevitably find yourself in the void generated by antisocial tendencies. Your ideas, skills, emotions, temper, courage, and all the rest won’t have been built upon, tested, broken down, rebuilt, and refined by other human beings. You can only really be a shell of what a human is meant to be. The ultimate test, I guess, is integrating your philosophy with the world. It’s a lot harder than doing it in your sandbox.
I think many of us fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing the work of practicing philosophy in isolation, but it’s actually a distraction from the much more difficult task of practicing it with other people. People who make us angry, sad, distracted, worse than we want to believe we are. Being alone to let yourself impulsively dig deeper and deeper into intellectual or philosophical pursuits can easily be a convenient distraction from the thing we claim to be doing all along.
There’s a sort of irony in the fear or worry that you’ll never learn enough, too. You’ll certainly never get there without deep, intimate, interconnected life with other people. I really believe it. And for a lot of us, that’s incredibly scary too. To let the fear of not knowing enough keep you from truly living is a hell of a thing.
It's a great essay, and I came away with a similar thought.
They mention Erdos and applaud his intensity, transparently mentioning that he was an addict to antidepressants and amphetamines, and without the substance abuse he wasn't able to get any mathematical work done.
To me this is the antithetical to being intellectually rich. More like enslaved to our own intellectualism.
I want to have the freedom to think about the things that I want to think about. Being forced instead to reason through problems, not of my choosing, on behalf of someone else... well that's life for most!
I appreciate this perspective as it matches mine and I think comes from experience. I imagine myself sitting on my peak and seeing millions, maybe billions, of other peaks and the desire to traverse them propels me forward. However, as soon as I'm a quarter of the way up one, I start to think, what am I missing on the other peaks? That's the FOMO. Then I spend the next five years of my life partially breaching a thousand ideas and never experiencing satisfaction.
We (Americans) have this culture of individualistic self-invention, consumer identity as a lifestyle (intellectual/artistic pursuits included), and the felt experience that worth/belonging/security is contingent on performance or achievement. Plus struggles with emotional intelligence and trauma (esp. among men), perpetuating that internalized conditionality.
I know so many people that got burned out and around their 30s, went off trying to do everything all at once (me too)… dancing around the hole.
The mixing of all of the above feels more uniquely American. Not that Japan (or others) don’t have some of the facets, like aspects of meritocracy (arguably balanced by other cultural values).
I've found myself finding more satisfaction and joy out of doing fewer things, but going deeper. Instead of picking up a new sport, I've gone deeper into running. Instead of learning a new instrument, I'm going deeper into the piano. Instead of re-inventing my business, I'm doubling down on what's worked in the past.
It's not the right mindset for every stage of life, but it's working well at the moment!
One's who are really learning aren't calling it out - look at kids learning to bike, new parents, early artists, new dancers, new swimmers, sports folks, researchers, journalists.
And there's pseudo learning, characterized by distinct effort to call the learning out. Reading 200 books a year, twitter, podcasts, hacker news. All cargo cult symbolism and consumerism.
Within real learning too, there's learning for a purpose and another just for the heck of it. Learning investments vs learning to run a marathon.
Learning sales is way different than learning piano, One where you learn mostly by doing, another by observing the delta between what is said and what actually happens.
Every form of learning is uncomfortable in its own way.
No one is really validating me for learning new things. I think the value of learning has more to do with whether you can leverage your learning in a socially positive way. It's hard to know whether learning about a particular topic will create opportunities to help anyone. I'm pretty sure no one but me will get anything from my recent interest in astrophysics beyond a little entertainment value. I consider it hedonic learning, but less so than stuff like pop culture trivia.
The essay frames an intellectually rich life as a kind of antidote to consumer culture, but for me it often mirrors the same patterns: FOMO, compulsiveness, neglect of relationships, a deep anxiety that I’ll never learn enough. The awareness that I’ll only ever scratch the surface of all there is to know has become a source of existential stress, not peace.
This isn’t to say intellectual life isn’t meaningful—but it's not a cure-all. It can be just as prone to distortion as anything else if pursued as a form of escape.