Like most everyone in the middle class with even moderately educated parents and even a moderately acceptable public school setup, I was raised to believe that learning was inherently valuable and admirable and moral.
Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, principals, vice principals, counselors, whomever—any of them will let you off the hook in order to learn or if learning is what you’re busy doing. It’s a get out of jail free card for things you’d prefer to avoid, and it’s also good for a lot of things you’d prefer to have—parties, food, rewards, awards, and cash.
That continues once you’re an adult. People say things like “as long as you’re always learning…” and “what matters is that you never stop learning.”
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Only every now and then do I stop and realize how damaging this overvaluation of learning can be—becasue if you’re like me, and I suspect a great many people are, the impulse remains.
The tableau is this: You’re 48. You’re average. You’re in debt and not particularly well off. You’re running out of time. And night after night, you’re sitting around learning. Reading books. Picking up skills. Considering (!) going back to grad school even, once again.
This is sick. Learning at this point is not good. And in fact, the reason you’re average and in debt and not particularly well off and have remained so until you were running out of time is that (in modern America, and for so many), you have spend decade after decade learning, and even now, you burn every night—burn it right away.
No, learning is not always good. Especially not if it takes the place of doing.
At my age, I’d much rather have the habit of doing than of learning, and much rather have all the subconscious machinery in my life directing me toward doing.
But that’s not how all the decades of my life thus far have conditioned me. Unless I make a very specific conscious effort at metacognition on a fairly continuous basis, every single night, and at every loose end, I inevitably drift back toward learning.
I just pick up books and start to read, and feel no guilt about it.
At my age, with as much as I have left to do to fulfill my debts to everyone—parents, children, society, debtors, etc.—that’s criminal.