Daily Insight:
True Education Stretches Far & Wide
When the West got rich, we wiped the grime off our brow, polished our boots, and dusted our shirts clean, readied for the knowledge economy—our value was no longer tied to sweat or sinew, but in what we knew.
We became salespeople, analysts, managers, we gave birth to a thousand new job titles that would sound like gibberish to a 1800's Lincolnshire farmer, and to train each generation of nine-to-fivers, an equal number of college modules.
As competition grew, we had to specialise.
Out of a thousand able-bodied souls, pretty much everyone can serve coffee, deliver mail, or stack supermarket shelves . . .
. . . but how many can diagnose a heart condition?
How many can engineer a bridge?
How many can translate the code of law?
Specialist degrees breed specialist jobs (for specialist money)—it's no wonder the pressure of education outweighs thousands of dollars of debt.
I'm not complaining. We're damn lucky - the alternative is coal mines, cotton fields, and tanneries - and yet, this specialisation comes with a sinister side effect:
"Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another."
"There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called a university."
"A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens to music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets."
(Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac)
Through specialisation, we castrate wisdom.
Our learning is no longer whole and unifying, like the trunk of a tree that collects thousands of wiry branches into a strong central core; it's shattered, the shards split up and locked away in their respective field of study. This is your domain. Live with it. Die with it.
A rich education should not be a slave to titles, textbooks, or colleges.
It should be free and fluid, ready to blossom wherever your interest naturally sways; if anything, that's the only way it can be complete—truth is not neatly divided into subjects, but found in their synthesis.
I like to compare it to a hike: the best ones give you time to meander—to stop for the view, to look under stones, to let curiosity pull you off the stony trail, refusing the rigid idea of A to B.
True education stretches far and wide.
Yours,
Odysseas
Links
Book - The Way of Men by Jack Donovan (US) (UK)
I'm rereading this after a few years, and it still cuts sharp.
What does it mean to be a man? This is the big question of the book.
Donovan pushes morality and politics to the side to search for the core non-negotiables of masculinity—those which transcend culture, geography, and time.
He argues that gangs are central to masculine expression, and that the four "tactile virtues" - strength, courage, mastery, honour - define masculinity above all others.
Most of the arguments are based in anthropology and evolution - life before civilization rocked things up - but Donovan also uses history, tradition, and faraway cultures to illustrate each point, from the Romans to Shakespeare to Hollywood mafia classics.
This book is challenging to some, and a sigh of relief for others—it's blunt, unforgiving, and far from politically correct.
Essential reading for every man.
Article - Decluttering by Ben Meer
I revisit this one whenever shit piles up.
Decluttering is not a one-and-done decision that follows your 3am motivation spike—it needs regular care, or stuff, junk, and yet more stuff will sneak back into your life.
I like that it goes beyond just physical decluttering: it shares tips to regain order in relationships, finances, time management, and the digital realm.
I don't care for the overly blunt LinkedIn-speak you see in the self-improvement sphere, but for something like this, it works.
Program - Consensus
Even after college, I find research tough. I'm tired of sifting through abstracts and wasting my time with irrelevant papers that Google Scholar thought were maaaaaybe useful?
Maybe . . . ? No? (good luck mate)
Consensus is a smarter way to research.
Within seconds, it scans through 200M+ peer-reviewed papers and offers you precise answers, with every claim neatly cited and ready for you to look into further.
Writing my book, I'm surprised at how many obscure tangents pop up, and Consensus has saved me hours of grinding through Google for papers that may or may not exist at all—instead, I am handed them on a silver platter.
I respect their mission of making research more accessible, especially when AI is used not to replace thought, but to aid it.
You can give it a spin right now (without making an account), but if you want a deeper look, the link above will give you a free month of their premium membership.
New video
Every time I change around my desk setup, I like to cover it in a new video.
Instead of dumping a boring list of items onto your head, I have tried my best to sprinkle in some general workspace philosophy so that you can use what you already have, without feeling the need to buy a hundred different things.
Watch it here:
(some links above are affiliate links, supporting the channel at no extra cost to you)