One of the most freeing moments I’ve lived in the past few years, happened while writing this post on optimization and surfing life.
Recently, I finished “Lost in Thought” by Zena Hitz and was blessed once again with the reminder that “optimization” is one of the most common indicators being tracked by people and yet, it may not be the best one.
In her book, Zena spends a lot of time talking about our relationship with learning.
She points out that, the way our society is arranged we mostly practice “instrumental learning”, meaning, we learn something due to a specific task or goal.
This is not wrong, in any way.
If you have something that you need to do at your job or a new skill you need to launch your own business, learning so you can solve these problems is great and you should do it!
However, in her view, true learning does not have a specific goal in mind. It happens for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of doing it. It’s done in “hiding”, in the confines of your own private life.
We have an inherent need and desire to learn without boundaries created by specific contexts such as work. When we’re actually able to do this, we end up exploring our relationship with the world and ourselves in a much more meaningful way, making us smarter and better human beings.
Learning for the sake of learning, in the modern world, may seem like a crazy concept. It felt really good to hear it explained so well by Hitz.
For years I’ve felt the need to justify my own reading and learning as indirect ways to improve my performance. I’ve always tried to find connections between whatever interest/book I was exploring and what I was supposed to be doing. That way, I could slightly calm my inner critic pointing out that I should be “optimizing” for higher performance, even with learning.
It makes no sense.
To have that pressure, approaching learning that way 100% of the time.
If we have a goal and you need to learn in order to achieve it, by all means, let’s do it! However, we should also be able to cultivate a relationship with learning that’s based on true, pleasurable growth, not on metrics and tasks.
Reading “Mother Night” by Kurt Vonegaught or “It” by Stephen King1 is not going to help me at my job but I enjoy it and will keep doing it. Learning how to cook a Christmas dessert won’t help me “optimize” anything but it will give me the pure satisfaction of cooking for my family.
Developing the will to pursue learning for its own sake, is one of the best ways we can honor Métis and bring a Modern Golden Age.
While writing this, my brain went: “Oh but it helps you understand pop culture and use it as a reference!” which is true. However, I’m not reading it because of that, but out of the pure pleasure of reading fiction.