“Am I Wasting My Life by Learning the Things I Don’t Need to Learn?”
Am I asleep at the wheel while the car is hurtling down the cliff?
Last summer while I was visiting Turkey I decided to re-read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” on a personal dare.
I assigned the task to myself as a test of self-discipline and mental fortitude.
The unabridged Turkish edition ran a whopping 1,900 pages. It was a two-volume set, each volume as thick as my biceps.
I quickly discovered that Tolstoy could write fifty pages on any word you can pick up from a dictionary. He was a horrifically prolific writer.
He wrote about horses, dinner tables, ballrooms, letters the daughters of second-rate nobles wrote to one another (in French!), soldiers and commanders, horses and cannons, insults hopes and heartbreaks, Napoleon and his disastrous 1812 run on Russia.
On page number 1200, I gave up and quit despite my wife’s admiration for me hanging in there that long. I simply ran out of patience since I knew the end of the unending novel anyways.
Privilege and Distance Vanished
Since then I’m thinking about classical education, the meaning and context of writing, and what it means to write, read and learn anything in our time.
Back when Tolstoy was writing, there was no Internet, no international travel, no TV, no pocket-size digital gadgets that pipe in the world news in real-time, no movies, video games and millions of other entertainment options.
Life was short, often brutal. Reading and writing were the privileges of the very few like Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy.
Now, these lines, written by a writer no one knows anything about, might be read by someone that we again know nothing about — a reader living in Mongolia or on a ship sailing in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The same reader might soon be writing something and hitting the Publish button, to be read by me seconds later.
We are all enjoying the incredible outreach of the written words and the life options they provide us.
Online Careers
A career used to be something that you entered into once, when you were young, and then exited from the other end of the tunnel with the proverbial gold watch around your wrist and a few short years left to enjoy your retirement.
No more.
Now we are serial career builders and around-the-clock content creators. And most of it is happening online.
We are not only readers and writers but ONLINE readers and writers and that is an important distinction. Tim Denning made the crucial point first in one of his seminal newsletters and I think he is right on the money.
Online behavior means a new type of reading, writing, and living.
Online life forces us to be extremely relevant, picky, choosy, sharp, reflective, critical, productive, and on our toes 24–7.
We no more have the patience to read for pages how the ruffling of a crinoline evening gown or the perfumed accident of a “ravishing beauty” triggers smoldering amorous temptations within the breast of a repressed aristocrat.
“What’s in it for me, right now?” is the radioactive question of the online age.
This has philosophical, political, as well as technical and egotistically personal repercussions.
It forces us to question what we are doing with our lives, how we are spending our time, and whether it’s worth it or not.
Utility in a Fast-Changing World
The other night as I was talking with a friend of mine he proudly shared that his son was studying anthropology at college. I was dying inside to ask him “but why for God’s sake!?” but held my tongue.
On a philosophical level, in this age of apps that we can download for free or buy for $4.95, I wonder why I studied geometry in high school or learned accounting principles when my accounting software can produce perfect reports within an hour.
Long years of formal education were supposed to (let’s admit it) distinguish us from the masses, help us become leaders, and generate the kind of prominence, money, and authority that online platforms now provide to almost anyone, correct?
Why did I learn grammar, Greek classics, and sociology when an Instagram influencer with perfect teeth and gums can lead the millions?
I’m sure leadership still means something but what?
The Century of Printed Encyclopedias
Don’t laugh but when I was growing up back in the 20th century, we used to save our money to buy encyclopedias that filled a whole long shelf of our bookcase.
My civil servant family was proud to own something called “Meydan Larousse,” a 14-volume printed encyclopedia translated from French.
It never occurred to us to ask “is the stuff in there still valid?” since the world remained the same from year to year. You could rely on the good old Larousse even when its pages started to yellow and crumble.
These days I can’t even be sure if a Wikipedia page updated yesterday is still good or not. I’m an “info-paranoiac” (I just made up that one) and I don't believe I’m the only one out there.
The Brutality of Politics
On a political level, the online world again forces me to question my confidence in classical education.
What do Dostoyevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Chekov, Tolstoy, and dozens of other stellar Russian writers matter when at the end, at the final brutal undeniable end, the same literate culture gave us Putin? Why did we read them?
At this writing, Ukrainian men, women, and children are torn to pieces in the streets of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol, and all the other cities that we would know nothing about but for the power of online communications.
What happened to “never again?”
What happened to all the countless hours that many generations of students spent sitting at their desks learning the “canons” of Western civilization?
Not only that, but the earth is warming up and Greenland and Antarctica are melting, pointing at the same possible futility of an archaic model of education.
You show data, undeniable scientific data, and seemingly sane and educated people shrug and respond with that same cynical answer: “Fake news.”
SIDEBAR: Is civilization a collective suicide pact? I hope not.
To me, it’s clear that many of us have probably learned all the things that we did not need to learn to start with since the results are chilling.
Writing Has Changed Too
On a technical level and speaking as a professional writer who made a living writing for Fortune 100 companies, I again see the shortcoming of the old model of “encyclopedic learning.”
The online world has no room for literary pride. Either you write straight from the heart, with knowledge skill and logic, and get to the point fast, or you’ll be gone. Even if you have a Ph.D. degree from Yale’s English department, a 25-year old writer from Nigeria can topple your cart in a heartbeat.
It’s a no-holds-barred online world out there that has no room for that old sense of entitlement.
As a writer, you live and die not for your diplomas, family name, or awards of yesteryear but for what you contribute right now today. The online readers and the market decide instantly whether you are worth your keystrokes or not.
To narrow the scope even further, that brings me to a burning issue that probably never occurred to the writers of the previous centuries: headlines.
But before that, just a short excursion into a closely related topic…
Publishing in the 20th Century
Back in the 20th century, a writer used to work a year or two on a book. Then submit it to a traditional publisher and waited for the editor’s reply, which was followed by another year or two of back and forth editing. And if all went well, the publication was scheduled according to the publishing house's busy calendar.
So eventually, after another year or two you would hopefully see your work published. Unless you were willing to invest four or five years of your precious time from start to finish, your thoughts ideas dreams could not see the light of the day.
Then, there was the matter of distribution and the placement and positioning of your book in bookstores. Unless you were already a known name, your precious baby would be delegated to the back shelf of a dusty bookstore or library, with close to zero chances of being read.
After a year or two of obscurity, your book would be removed altogether from bookshelves, returned to the publisher, most possibly on its way to revert to what it was before you showed up: wood pulp.
All in all, writing was a sad exercise in futility for most writers.
Publishing Now
Thank goodness those days are gone.
Now you can write something in an hour and publish it online within 15 minutes, and start to make money right away as well. Gone are the gatekeepers of the old establishment.
But now we have the issue of readability.
Does a tree fall in the forest if no one is aware that it fell?
Same situation. Have you really written something if nobody is even aware that you’ve written it?
That’s the tough challenge of our online world.
The Pain and Pleasure of Headlines
The new gatekeeper is the headline. We live or die by the headline.
If you can write an arresting, delicious, head-turner of a headline, they will read you. Otherwise, it’s the same as though you’ve never written anything. People stare at your headline and move on to the next headline.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a single traditional college where they offer courses on writing headlines. That’s how asleep at the wheel traditional education is.
Clickbait is a serious online issue that again Tim Denning addressed so well. The importance of headlines gave rise to oceans of crap designed to fool the readers.
However, no matter how “outrageous” your headline seems to be, if you can deliver the promise, if you can follow through with your core statement, then there is no misrepresentation. There is no clickbait trickery if you are actually delivering the goods.
Discipline Transferred
Headings in online writing forces us to dig down deep and find what we really are trying to say without misdirection or fluff. It’s the new online discipline that transfers to other areas of life.
If you are used to thinking hard and saying what exactly needs to be said in a heading, then you also start to show the same acuity and precision when you are talking to your car dealer, dentist, or friends and relatives. It helps tremendously to be that pointed and direct in every facet of your daily life.
That’s why learning and practicing how to write headings that people like and click is a great exercise on how to be truthful without boring the other person to tears. That’s obviously one thing Tolstoy did not understand and that’s why his masterpiece is 1900 pages long instead of 300.
A Good Thing
The rapidly changing content and context of the online world is a good thing since it forces me to question the value of what I learn, what I read and write, and what I do with it in daily reality.
Thanks to online communications, we don't have the time or excuse now for complacency when it comes to the intrinsic value of our time.
We will all die one day but hopefully not asleep at the wheel, thinking that we “know something” when all we carry with us are fossils of memory that don’t help us to communicate clearly, give us the right to consume the time of our readers or prevent the political and physical disasters in the world.
Thank you Ugur for this great piece. I have recently entered into the world of technical writing for an online finance publication, and it is forcing me to change how I think and approach my writing. Your comments are spot on with where my head needs to be.
….lunch, my friend?