Life is complex and requires time and effort to understand
Summary
- Understanding the world cannot be done by reading sound bites (twitter, etc), but requires time and effort to comprehend
Details
- Reading a book is a good way to try and comprehend something since it requires focus on one subject for an extended period of time
References
Quotes
Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right – you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated. I realised that the times in my own life when I’ve been most successful on Twitter – in terms of followers and retweets – are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I’ve been attentiondeprived, simplistic, vituperative. Of course there are occasional nuggets of insight on the site – but if this becomes your dominant mode of absorbing information, I believe the quality of your thinking will rapidly degrade
Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.
Related
- Complex systems have multiple points of failure
- The continued existence of complex interactive systems depends upon preventing the maximisation of any variable - Bateson
- Simplexity Why simple things become complex and how complex things can be made simple
- An idea wants to be shared. And, in the sharing, it becomes more complex, more interesting, and more likely to work for more people - Adrienne Maree
- Even children of atheists invoke a God-like designer to explain the complexity in the world around them