Questioning yourself
Much is said about ignorance. It is often said that whoever is ignorant is happier. What makes intelligence worthless and even that many of the intelligent people want to become ignorant…. but is this so? Let’s see it.
How to be smart
According to the saying, we are the average of the 5 people around us. If we apply a simple rule of three we can deduce that if we surround ourselves with intelligent people, we will be smarter, right? The truth is that yes, but in the very long term, so it is not something we can trust, because people change and the intelligent can become people who are not so in a while. Also, no one likes to feel like the fool of the group and if you set out to do so, you are going to get frustrated.
Surely the best way to instantly get smarter is to read a lot. Yes. A topic. If you don’t read, people are going to fool you from all sides. We all have thousands of years of wisdom at our fingertips on a subject compacted in a book, why not open it? Although it must also be made clear that not all books are the same. For example: If you read a science fiction book, you will not learn much, and if you read a self-help book, probably neither. Much better than reading self-help is reading philosophy, but I will leave that topic for another time. The best thing is to read books on topics that you want to learn and that are from recognized authors and, if you don’t like reading and want an alternative, you can take online courses by watching videos on platforms such as Udemy or SkillShare.
HOW TO BE IGNORANT
Being ignorant gives us the advantage of “happiness” but deprives us of knowing many other things necessary to function in everyday life. But would you feel complete happiness, leaving aside opportunities that could be offered to you if you weren’t ignorant?
Unfortunately or fortunately, being ignorant is much more difficult than not being it today, since we are all forced to go to school and, willingly or not, things are learned.
The best formula for being ignorant is to do nothing before and after school. Something that seems impossible, since in today’s society it is frowned upon to even sleep because you are not productive. And I do not recommend that you be ignorant either, but I do recommend that you do not pursue intelligence as your life goal.
LET’S TALK A LITTLE ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF HAPPINESS
How beautiful is happiness, right? Or, rather, those little moments in which we feel happy because happiness is not eternal at all. You can be happy reading, listening to a song, or eating, but only in those moments. If you feel that happiness is eternal, it is probably not happiness, it is surely self-realization.
We must stop pursuing happiness as an end since it is always going to escape our hands as it is ephemeral. It is a much better and more real objective to pursue a state of well-being, without our having to be happy. Also, everyone has the right to be sad, not everything in life is rosy.
Paradoxically, you will be happier if you stop pursuing happiness because you live better without the pressure you feel when pursuing something than with it. There is an oriental concept called “Wu-Wei” that is about doing nothing and letting life throw its obstacles at you, life itself will guide you on the path you have to follow. This seems to be a bit to leave your future in the hands of fate, but it’s up to you.
THE QUESTION
Now a new disquisition opens up to us… Why do we have this terrible desire to be more intelligent? In the end, we all die, right?
Pensar hace al inteligente loco y menos exacto
(Thinking makes the intelligent mad and less exact)
This is what Santiuve says in Insominficante and he is right because thinking is not bad in itself, but if you are intelligent, it is most likely that you overthink things, and that is what makes you fail in your decisions.
The truth is that intelligence is not a defined concept. For someone being smart can mean being creative, for example to all of us who write on Medium. For a baker, being smart will surely mean measuring the ingredients of his bread better so that he does not go overboard and thus make it better. Being intelligent is not always knowing the square root of 69258. Let’s base ourselves on this idea, dear reader, I want to ask you; do you think Albert Einstein was smarter than you? I am going to give you my appreciation and it is that Einstein was good at the things he liked because I do not know if you know that, when he was young, he had very bad grades in high school and the university he attended, at to the point that even his teacher told him that he would be nothing in life. Are you or him smarter?
I don’t know your conclusions, but mine is that by trying, you can achieve something similar to what he did on his day.
CONCLUSION
Enough of wanting to be better and smarter every day as if it would be bad how we are now. And no, I am not saying that we should be conformists, obviously we have to improve, but not every day and not with invented goals such as blissful happiness, which I hope has become clear that it is something impossible to achieve, at most you can achieve that your days have more moments of happiness than you had before, but the concept of “being happy” is not very realistic.
On the other hand, being ignorant should not be our goal either. After all, if we are, we would have more than a million possibilities to think, besides that it is not a very realistic goal, because nobody wants to ignore more things than they do now.
Do not be smart because it is a goal that you will never be able to fully achieve, do not be ignorant because it is not worth it, do not pursue happiness because you will get frustrated. Go on with your life as before.
