We Need a Gym for the Mind
I listened to a Podcast episode of Modern Wisdom with Cal Newport. There was an interesting idea of him feeling like Cassandra. He called the problem of the modern knowledge work environment early and, in his book Deep Work, gave a pretty straightforward manual on how to solve it on a personal level. I never read it, but from the summaries it seems that A World Without Email could be seen as a manual on how to solve the issue on a corporate level.
The intriguing part comes when he says that he didn’t even base his argument on the decline of workers’ satisfaction and mental health. The distracted world we live in today costs hard dollars. When a department can measure its performance clearly (for example, a sales department), it is exempt from meetings. On the flip side, if there is no clear, measurable performance metric, all kinds of performance idols emerge. This is where the individual worker will do their best to answer emails as quickly as possible, at least showing something that resembles performance.
Everybody knows the problem, has known it for a long time, and yet it has gotten worse and is getting worse still.
I see the same pattern on a personal level. There seems to be no clear and measurable method for building knowledge. But everybody knows instinctively that knowledge is one key pillar of mental performance. So, all kinds of idols are erected that symbolise effective self-education.
When the modern belief that life should feel easy and nice, that it should be ongoing joy and pleasure, chimes in as the operating system, knowledge becomes unattainable.
The mental processes that underlie the creation of genuine knowledge are identical to learning. You wrestle with ideas you don’t completely understand until something suddenly clicks. Then you wrestle more, and something clicks again. You rinse and repeat until you have some sense of the complete thing. The main difference is that the whole thing is opaque to you when you are learning, and to you and others when you build knowledge.
Wrestling with ideas is straining. All learning techniques, such as active recall or quizzing yourself, are methods for learning under pressure. Your body and your brain like homeostasis. They like to preserve energy. Evolutionarily, this inclination makes sense. Nature will constantly force you to move, to learn, and to adapt. It doesn’t make sense that the individuals being forced have the desire to do so on top. Instead, we developed powerful mechanisms to resist the forces of nature.
This is what we need to overcome to learn and to build knowledge. (Almost) Nobody enjoys the strain that underpins the proper learning techniques. Students will read and re-read textbooks rather than use active recall because the former is easier. However, external and internal pressures are high, so students will gradually adopt more effective learning techniques to earn the degree.
When this external pressure is alleviated, the motivation to lean into the strain drops. The result is that learning also drops significantly. That doesn’t mean that you won’t learn anything anymore after you finish school. But external pressures and constraints again dictate the content and direction of your learning. That means that we learn what we have to learn, not what we want to learn.
Cal Newport offers a key piece of the puzzle for solving this issue. We have to learn to like the strain. Like an athlete who likes the strain because he associates it with the burning muscles and lunges with future success, we have to condition ourselves to fall in love with the strain of learning and wrestling with ideas.
The Zettelkasten Method is designed to become a gym for your mind. Your Zettelkasten is the place where you can learn to love the strain. The Zettelkasten gives you a tangible result of your exertion. The number of notes, the steady growth of your structure notes, and the surprising ideas will all be part of the reward.
Luhmann wrote:
If you have to write anyway, it is pragmatic to exploit this activity by creating a system of notes that can act as a competent communication partner. Source
I say:
If you have to wrestle with ideas anyway, it is pragmatic to exploit the activity by creating a system of notes that will be a gym for your mind.
I will lean more into the idea of training your mind specifically in another post. It becomes more and more obvious that we are losing our minds, part by part.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. – Frank Herbert
Social Media is directing our attention. AI starts to think for us (at least for a sizable portion of the students). This will continue until nothing is left of us if we never stop submitting.