The Future of Learning

Consider the benefits of a widespread adoption of AI-based learning and tutoring akin to Khan Academy’s approach:

• Can be used on demand at any time of the day and in any language.

• Can process large amounts of data, complex information, and calculations light years faster than any human.

• Carries around no emotional baggage that might affect consistency in teaching, is infinitely patient and eliminates virtually all feelings of contempt, shame, and judgment

• Far less likely to spread misinformation and imparting personal biases within the subject material

• Will likely be far cheaper than hiring traditional tutors

If we continue sucking the life, joy, and humanity out of the learning process by centering it around inane, rote memorization, by exalting the standardized test, by glorifying the prize of accreditation that is the college degree solely as a means of generating status and money,

If our present culture places all the emphasis on conformity and compliance, shaming everyone that either refuses or is unable to meet these arbitrary standards, fueling this worldwide epidemic of mental illness and suicide,

If we continue to foster our complacency towards this backwards, outdated, and blatantly counterproductive education system, 

What advantage do we have left versus a computer? What reason is left to persist our faith in human pedagogy? A motivated, compassionate, erudite, patient, and wise teacher can work wonders in transforming our next generation of citizens; it is a teacher that takes advantage of the positive human aspects of pedagogy through inspiration, passion, and connection—not all the malignant aspects of contempt, shame, and judgment that are characteristic of so many interpersonal interactions within the current status quo of the education system. The only problem is that there is a stark paucity of such teachers, and certainly no systems and no culture to foster them and harness their potential.

It’s about time we learn our lesson. Will we consign one of the cornerstones of human civilization to obsolescence and admit defeat to our very own creation, or will we finally decide to stop basking in our comfort and complacency, to finally challenge the status quo, to finally begin to genuinely ask ourselves the question: “What is school for?”

Yes, you can.

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even gods can ask of you.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Yes, I can.

To take things for granted

I find it particularly interesting that either we’re innately psychologically engineered to or that our culture inculcates a certain dissatisfaction of our lives, nearly always irrespective of the suffering in comparison to others. Isn’t it interesting that the vast majority of us living in our posh and insulated first world countries are equally or more dissatisfied than those living in less privileged societies across the world? 

It just requires one step back, a moment of quietism and perspective to see our lives merely as they are, to liberate ourselves from this oppressive milieu that pervades our consciousness as members of this society, to detach ourselves from the norms and conventional modes of thought that manufacture this insatiable desire that incessantly prods and pesters our subconscious for more or better. 

Yes—it inevitably creates progress. It inevitably moves our society forward at an exponential, unprecedented rate of growth. But we have to also acknowledge that for some things, enough is enough. Not everything in our lives needs progress, improvement, change, and forward motion (or an illusion of it). Certainly, there are things that do need to change, that do need to truly be better. But if we never truly ask ourselves what all this is even for, then how can we know if our efforts are worthwhile? Is this really the kind of world we want to live in? Is this really the culture we want? Are these really the stories we wish to tell ourselves, even if they’re not making us happy?

The Fear of Missing Out

The truth is that we all “miss out” equally. When we really think about it, when we consider the staggering scale and complexity associated with everything that we could ever do in our entire life, we actually accomplish very little in our lives. Irrespective of the degree of ambition or initiative we have to cross off every item on our bucket lists, we nonetheless exhaust an infinitesimally small fraction of this daunting realm of possibility. The fear of missing out makes no real distinction between variety of activity and uniqueness of life experience; it is predicated on a spurious assumption that having more types of activities is inherently good, as it purportedly allows for more variation in our actual unique experience of life itself. 

But what if our experience of life is as much about what we don’t experience versus what we do experience? If we begin with the premise that we are primarily defined by our experiences—the interconnected sum of all the moments in our lives, regardless if they were moments of happiness or sadness, of pride or shame, of momentous importance or stark inconsequentiality, of joy or oppression—and then interpose the desire to alter those experiences by way of external influence, we can very easily begin to elicit the inherent flaws ingrained within this short-sighted philosophy of life. The reality is that we are who we are only because of the incredibly specific set of circumstances that belong only to ourselves. 

Virtually every individual who did anything remotely important in this world only did what they did because of the very specific way by which they chose to go about their lives. If we truly believe in a “fear of missing out,” all the success stories we learn about are actually failure stories. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be a failure; why didn’t he feel obligated to travel the world, go to more festivities, or get involved in more hobbies, when he instead consigned himself to the strife associated with leading and advocating for the civil rights of his people? Steve Jobs would be a failure; ninety hours of work per week is certainly going to increase his chances of missing out on all the joy and entertainment he could have going out with his friends or family. 

It isn’t about a variety of activities. It isn’t about “missing out,” because we all “miss out” on the opportunity to live out someone else’s unique experience of life, however banal or sensational they seem on the surface. It’s about embracing the vastly different walks of life we each possess. It’s about recognizing that while we don’t necessarily have to be proud of everything we experience and don’t experience alike, it will nevertheless ultimately define who we are and what we achieve.

Yes, you should keep using “should.”

Over the years I’ve noticed a trending subset of progressivism that rallies against the word “should,” as it is a term often fraught with shame, self-doubt, self-hate, and an impertinent form of judgment, constituting a pernicious predisposition towards conformance to seemingly self-evident societal standards and norms. Anti-should proponents argue that we should ignore the toxic elements of conventional thought that is the source of all things we should do, and instead look within ourselves for answers regarding what is truly right for us. At its core, this notion is based on the premise that each individual has a unique identity that is completely disparate from external influence. It falls within the same train of thought that I found problematic with Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star, where she attempts to adumbrate human identity with this fundamentally flawed bifurcation of the “essential” self and “social” self, the former being a mode of consciousness unadulterated by our socialization and our circumstances, factors that in turn ultimately define the latter as its counterpart.

The problem is that human psychology is incredibly complex and messy; it rarely, if ever, strictly confines itself to such clear-cut divisions. As humans, we exalt the notion of free will—we desperately want to believe that we’re in control, that we’re the ones in charge, that we will shape our destiny, that we do indeed understand these endlessly convoluted networks of cause and effect. We want to believe that there is some inexorable part of us, the intangible being that constitutes “you” or “me.” But the reality is that our socialization and our individual circumstances—factors that are virtually completely out of our control—define the vast majority of our identity; the sum of these external influences inevitably imbue themselves within each and every one of our actions, our words, and our thoughts. If we truly decide to use these terms to define ourselves, the “essential” and “social” are fundamentally inseparable, so much so that it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between either. An individual denuded of socialization and external influence is not one that retains an essential self; not only would they have no social self, but they would have no self and no identity to begin with. 

The truth is that we cannot liberate ourselves from the psychological grasp of “should.” It is as human of a tendency as our desire for love or for war, for friendship or for rivalry, for truth or for purpose. It is an integral component within our tendency to conform; as Seth Godin would say, “People like us do things like this.” What all this is, is a constant battle of acculturation, of which “should” gains the most prominence in our cultures. The anti-should proponents are merely arguing for a different should by saying we shouldn’t use should in the traditional sense of using the word. And the reason this movement has not gained significant traction is because it appears to fight against our very nature. As Seth Godin would also say, “Ideas that spread, win.” So instead of tearing apart the fabric of our own language, instead of hurling ourselves into a dizzying battle of semantics and the baseless rhetoric that is characteristic of so much self-help content out there, we must recognize that in the end, all there is to do is to fight for a culture we believe in. That is, to fight for what we all should do, to make the world a better place and to live a life we’re proud to live.

Seasons and Emotions

How do we know when it’s spring? Clearly, there are seasons in some sense (at least in most parts of the world), but isn’t it slightly strange that we assign an arbitrary day—a strict cutoff line where one season “ends” and one season “begins”—to what is, in fact, an incredibly moderate, gradual shift of average temperatures over time? 

When does winter end and spring begin? Where does the state of being “sad” end and the state of being “happy” begin? Much like the seasons, there is neither an end nor a beginning to our emotions. We have a predilection towards giving ourselves concrete terms to make sense of the world we live in that is proliferated with these kinds of imprecise and inexact states. There is nothing inherently wrong with these mental shortcuts; I’d imagine we’d be overwhelmed if we were to constantly have to delineate each and every detail of our state of being to every single person we interacted with. 

But in the interactions that truly matter—the ones that are responsible for determining how we love one another, whether in friendship or relationship—don’t merely let the blunt tool that is our language ultimately deter us from understanding the incredible nuance in how each of us feel.

Tragedies and Statistics

"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."

— Unknown

Despite the fact that this quote has constantly been misattributed to Stalin, even when there is no such proof of him ever uttering such a phrase, many still dismiss this quote as if it was indeed the self-justifying words of a ruthless, calculating, inhumane dictator—a murderer of millions—of an era that has long past us. 

Though I will argue that it is a reminder for each and every one of us to be conscious of the fact that our existence is not merely bound to the confines of our immediate social circles—our friends, our family, our acquaintances, our coworkers and our community. It is an exhortation to recognize that we are also part of humanity—that when the world begins to fall apart, when our nations fall prey to disease, famine, or war, when millions across the globe unjustly perish and perpetually suffer, we do not consign ourselves to being mere bystanders, indifferent to the chaos that rages on on our computer and television screens because we dismiss it simply as bad news, as unfortunate circumstances, as something we hope someone will figure out. 

Instead, we preoccupy ourselves with the “tragedies” of our personal lives. Yes—the people in our lives and our own individual pursuit of happiness and fulfillment is undeniably important, but the world will not wait for us to decide if it’s “worth it” to sacrifice the stability of our normal lives, to go out of our way to change it. Someday, somehow, irrespective of our willingness or desire to commit, we must all dutifully acknowledge the roles we each must play to make this world a better place, and to prevent the proliferation of evil, lest it suddenly appear at our doorstep when we least expect it.

Quote-worthy

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

― Oscar Wilde

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”

― Albert Einstein

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

― Mark Twain

We are predisposed to embrace the aphoristic, the epigrammatic, the quote-worthy—the concise, short snippets of truth that offer the among the most efficient means of attaining wisdom, the highest truth-to-energy-invested ratio out of any form of study we can do. 

But how many of these one- or two-sentence adages have we actually imbued into the walk of our daily life? To what extent have we actually internalized and integrated the truths within the framework of our consciousness? If, in the heat of the moment, they serve as a useful reminder to you to be your best self, so be it. But the greatest truths in our lives are derived from experience, whether the grueling challenges we overcame in life, or the countless hours we spent dutifully reading, writing, introspecting, and engaging in discourse to compose our thoughts. Without it, these adages become meaningless, hollow words that we merely use to affect a false sense of enlightenment and erudition. 

It is only when we understand truth in its most unrefined, coarse, and ungraceful form—the knowledge that is forged through trial and tribulation, that is gleaned from years upon years of diligence and mindfulness—that we can far more profoundly understand the beloved, elegant, quote-worthy adages.

Only after the fact

We find it all too easy to be haughty, to be disdainful, to speak with a choleric air of arrogance and superiority when we impudently operate by the premise that the people we’re speaking to are intentionally lazy, careless, inattentive, selfish, immoral, or hypocritical. 

But time and time again, once we actually take the time to learn the other person’s story, we regret our contemptuous behavior. It is only after the fact—only after we’ve learned that the person we lambasted for being timorous and cowardly had an incredibly traumatic past, only after we’ve learned that the employee that we shamed for making a mistake on our order has a severe mental disability, only after we’ve learned that the ostensibly irresponsible person that never showed up to our appointment got into a tragic car accident—that we begin to commiserate, that we begin to feel remorse. 

We are shamelessly quick to assign motives and fabricate narratives to swiftly quell our fear of the unknown, to provide us with at least a surface-level explanation for others’ behavior. But why? Why play this inane game vacillating between contempt and remorse when we can just be a little patient, to take a moment to ask the other person why, to wait things out and actually be presented with real evidence of a certain narrative?

The Paradox of Choice

One of the fundamental paradoxes of our lives is the one of choice. 

In the contemplation of our decisions—our rudimentary, superficial calculus of cause and effect, our biased judgments of what constitutes a good or bad outcome, and our overweening faith in a stable, predictable world—we often forget that, as humans, we have an absolutely horrendous track record at predicting the future, and an even worse record of making decisions that ultimately contribute to a happier or more fulfilling life. 

This is because we forget to factor in our bias for “good” outcomes when we partake in that calculus; by operating by our instinctive preconceptions of “good,” we predispose ourselves towards the path of least resistance, the options that seem to be laden with less suffering and strife. We would much rather prefer it if we didn’t fail; if we didn’t get fired from or rejected for a job; if we passed an exam or evaluation with flying colors; if we didn’t have to end a relationship or friendship even if it is holding us back. 

The paradox is that while we implicitly understand that suffering and strife is the only means by which we can grow as individuals and derive any meaning whatsoever from life, all our decision-making calculus is coded to obviate it. We think we know what’s best for us, but the stark reality is that we couldn’t be more wrong. Every single success story that we celebrate consists of failure, of people that made ostensibly terrible mistakes—failed classes, job rejections, ruined relationships, or missed opportunities. But by overcoming these challenges that came their way, they were able to divert space for growth in other areas in their life that ultimately contributed towards their success. 

So why is it, then, that we have such an aversion towards making purportedly risky choices? Do we really understand the long-term consequences of persisting on the beaten path, let alone the less-traveled one? And, above all, do we understand how those consequences will ultimately contribute towards a life worth living? 

If we value personal growth, if we wish to live a life with meaning, purpose, and success, then, paradoxically, we must learn to make decisions that will likely lead us to failure, in one form or another. 

“If failure is not an option, then neither is success.” 

— Seth Godin