Knowledge Addiction

23 July 2024

This is a good one:

https://www.nashvail.me/blog/stop-learning

I have a big idea and can see the components that need to come together, but I go slow, always fearful of breaking something. Like the addict in this piece, I'm ever conscious of doing something wrong out of ignorance, and seek to adddress that anxiety by learning / reading 'enough' to understand the pitfalls. This is often enough to kill the motivation I have in executing on the big idea to begin with. I'd like this part of myself to go on break for the next 50 years.

Here's a quote:

All addictions share two primary qualities:

They embody repetition without progress.

They produce incapacity as a payoff.

When you take [...] addiction and put it in the context of the endless flow of knowledge on the internet, you will begin to see a similar pattern. On the internet, or because of it, people get addicted to learning, following one tutorial after another, taking one course after another, one article after another, one "micro/centi/nano degree" after another that does nothing but produce incapacity and repetition without any real progress.

I remember having projects in hand, things to write, design and build. Instead of getting to work and finishing those, at several occasions I have chosen to take an online course or follow a tutorial or read through an article all of which were supposed to teach me how to build/design/write the said thing.

So why is that bad? You see, it's not, it becomes bad when you continue learning even when you know enough. Even when you're capable of jumping right into the project and figure things along the way, you keep delaying it. Beginning something new is uncomfortable, therefore instead you choose to read an article or take a course just so you can tell yourself that you're working, but in reality, you're just looping, you're not making any progress on the project.