Why bother reading?

Reflecting back on my journey to date, one thing I wish I could have started early on would be to read as much as possible (and mostly non-fiction). Unfortunately, it never occurred to me until my late undergraduate years; the intuition was missing. Ignorance, especially ignorance towards access to information, draws my attention whenever I glance back. I believe that many people are/were stagnant in their life because they are/were deprived [1] of the information which they needed to move forward.

Access to the internet and smart devices has made information much more accessible nowadays. Until my 10th standard, the internet was a rare thing (at least for me), and whenever I got access, I would jump right into the entertainment domains. I got my first smartphone in the 11th grade, but its primary task was for communication and entertainment purposes. At the undergraduate level, the internet became much more accessible, and having a personal laptop was a gateway to explore the wide domains that were out there.

Where would anyone (who, for some reason, lacked access to information) be if they had the intuition and access to information like we can access? How could we leverage the information that we have? I sometimes think of it. Everything could have been different for them, and the possibilities for us are endless. Whenever parents stress the need for education [2], they are trying to make us realize that information is powerful.

Schools and universities have some structure built around what content to teach students, and the syllabi are rigid. Test after test, the pattern repeats with varying syllabus complexity. The materials there are essential but are also incomplete; they teach us domain-specific information, but we are left to figure out other stuff ourselves. We are left with voids created by missing information.

The way we can fill these gaps would be to search for missing information ourselves, and the first step in this process would be to read [3] as much as possible. Whenever one feels stagnation or irritation, a good question to ask oneself would be, “What am I missing here?”

To unfreeze, maybe all that was required/requires is one book, one blog post, one essay, maybe even one line.

Notes:

[1] Deprivation can occur in many ways: self-imposed, state-imposed, family-imposed, abstracted educational content, deviated educational content, radicalized educational content, or any form of other censorship.

[2] My parents and my friends’ parents (not all, but mostly) had limited access to education, which was due to the country having limited educational hubs. It was not easily accessible, resources were not plentiful, and intuition was missing. It led to a chain effect in many domains, from jobs to living standards. Those who got access to education and advanced with higher education had plenty of compounding opportunities, and the returns were superlinear compared to those who lacked.

[3] Reading is not just about going through content and downloading it into our brains. The challenge when starting out is that whenever one is exposed to various domains of information, it gets hard to filter out, and sometimes information can engulf individuals radicalizing them into ideology, conspiracy. The essential skill here is to read the content in isolation without letting it have a solid imprint on you before you access it from all directions. But for that, you need more information, which means more reading.

May 2024 - Rishav Dhungel