Once you leave school — be it high school, college, or graduate school — how do you continue to learn? Is learning formal, informal, or nothing at all?
Share why if you wish.
Category: Learning
What Is Your Deepest Rabbit Hole?
Everyone has rabbit holes — the searching of some random bit of information that leads to more and more esoteric bits of data. What notable rabbit hole have you gone down?
Share why if you wish.
What Are Your Vices?
Knowing the challenges and obstacles you face is necessary for preparing yourself to face them. With that in mind, what are your vices?
While the classic seven deadly sins — greed, envy, sloth, pride, gluttony, lust, and wrath — are a good place to start in considering potential vices, it is far from an exhaustive list.
And it is not even clear that they are all vices. Why shouldn’t I be proud, say, of a hard-won accomplishment? And just what is sloth, anyway?
This is not, however, to discount from legitimate vices. There are certain behaviors and habits that can be quite destructive in any number of ways. If you find you can’t resist some habitual behavior — playing video games at the expense of everything else, for example, or drinking to excess, or gambling money you can’t afford to lose — that could be the sign of a problem.
With some amount of introspection, you can probably think of some parts of your life that you wish you could change. It might be as simple as being habitually late, or as complex as addictive behavior.
One thing to avoid, however, is letting others define your vices for you. What someone else thinks of as a vice might turn out to be a virtue for you, in the end. If you feel strongly that something is right for you even though others disagree, it may not, indeed, be a real vice.
In the end, it is important to understand and be realistic about yourself, including both your good and bad points. Knowing certain activities lead you to bad decisions can help you avoid those activities. It might be uncomfortable, at times, but probing and defining your own weaknesses can ultimately make you stronger.
Related questions: What is your weakness? When is it useful to fail? What do you do that you shouldn’t? What is uncomfortable but rewarding?
How Important Is Closure?
When coming to grips with a sudden change in life, some people feel the need for closure in order to move on. But is it really necessary?
Life can change very quickly, in ways both trivial and profound. You might lose a job, there might be a death in the family, or an appliance you depend on may stop functioning.
When a change like this happens, a natural instinct is to look for some closure. That might mean, respectively, an exit interview, a memorial service, or a repairperson’s visit. Once the closure happens, you can move on with your life.
However, closure is not something that occurs in our lives. We are born into a world that is already in motion, and as we grow and learn, we have to get up to speed on the state of things (and pick up some history as well).
Even when we meet someone new, we come in the middle of their story. And if they drift away, as friends sometimes do, there isn’t usually any sort of meaningful end point.
There is little doubt, though, that as a species we crave the sense of narrative completion. We look for it in the movies we watch, the books we read, and in other media we consume. A disappointing finale can ruin an entire TV series.
So which is it? Is a sense of closure necessary to process the events of the day? Or is it irrelevant, just an artificial narrative we construct that has no inherent meaning?
How important is closure?
Related questions: Why are people afraid of death? What can you control? Scripted or unscripted? How do you find peace when you need it?
How Do You Deal With Uncertainty?
Being in an uncertain situation can be extremely frustrating. Is there a way you have learned to deal with uncertainty?
Human beings, generally, feel more in control — and therefore, more comfortable — the more they know about something. In fact, that urge has been behind much of the development of science and technology over the last few hundred years. Wanting to know more, about how the world works and ways to modify it, is something that comes naturally to our species.
While this is true at a societal level, it is also true at an individual level as well. The more information we have, the more in control we feel.
For example, someone who has been diagnosed with a disease will often learn everything they can about it. Even very complicated systems, like the stock market or the political realm, people will study in great detail, trying to gain an edge.
In reality, knowing more does not always confer an advantage. So-called experts do not have a better record predicting the future than anyone else. There are plenty of examples of a basketball novice finishing ahead of a diehard fan in March Madness brackets, for instance.
There are certain times and certain situations that are completely out of your control. In that case, what do you do? Can you learn to embrace the uncertainty? Or instead, are there methods to feel more in control of an inherently uncontrollable scenario?
Related questions: What is unknowable? Why are we fascinated with the unknown? How do we know what we don’t know? Why don’t you know what makes you happy?