That’s a very wordy ‘ignorance is bliss’
Yeah. Said the same thing. Thomas Grey is eyerolling in his grave.
That’s what I do, I know things and I drink.
Wish I could drink, but I… ahem …know it’s not a good idea since my father was an abusive SOB when he was drinking. So I’m just stuck knowing, and there’s no escape.
Look at Gurdjieff over here.
Masters in behavior. Yep.
Initially, yes. Then proceed to know even more and become Gaia.
It’s a funny joke, but really this sort of thinking belies a big chunk of the problem in dealing with negative feelings. Almost universally, there is no such thing as information that you are worse off for knowing. Sure, there are edge cases like if you learn some country’s nuclear secrets and they send an army of bureaucrats/assassins after you to make your life hell - but I can almost guarentee, that has not happened to you.
The joke is referring to knowing about things like the outbreak of violence in Sudan. I’m not saying that violence in Sudan is not a bad thing - I’m just saying that knowing about it isn’t. Before, you didn’t know about it, so you couldn’t do anything about it. Now you do know about it, so you can do things like send money to aid organizations or petition your government to impose sanctions on a repressive government. Or you can say “that sucks, but it’s not my problem” and move on with your day.
How about knowing Trump was an incredibly bad person to have running the country, and being forced to watch it happen anyway?
Knowing it is happening, you can do things to prepare yourself for bad things that may happen. You can build up your emergency fund, make more connections with people in your community, start preparing to emmigrate, politically organize, or use him as an example to teach the next generation what not to do. Or you can just shrug and say “nuthin’ I can do about it”. But either way, the information is, at worst, neutral. It is either irrelivant, or can be used to improve your life and the lives of others relative to what they would have been if you didn’t know.
Like, if it is your birthday, and the forecast calls for rain, it is a good thing to learn this. Otherwise you may have planned a picnic. Sure, it is “bad news” that it is raining - but it is good that you know, because now you can plan to go to the movies instead.
i thought for years that it’s not good if people seek too much education, because ultimately abstract thoughts are a burden to most people. some people can deal fine with it, but to most it blocks the natural flow of emotion and life, thus kinda crippling the individual psychologically.
it’s only become a craze in the 1970s that everybody has to go study and seek a diploma, because then started the era of office jobs and company owners wanted to have a larger pool of available white-collar workers available so if there’s more supply in workers in a specific field, the prices for that labor (wages) can diminish, and companies run more efficiently.
I also think that the instruction to “think critically” is bad in a similar sense: it’s unnatural and does more harm than good. unfortunately, it’s become an ideology strong enough to persevere anyways, and there should be less of it. i think people should listen more to their feelings.
Yea at times sure, but actually caring and being empathetic about things is genuinely worth it all.
I don’t know
It’s almost as if Thomas Gray was on to something almost three hundred years ago.
