“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” - from Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” – Jesus
“Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” – Ecclesiastes 12:12
I am annoyed by a particular phenomenon I see going on in what could be loosely categorized as the “online world”, which I take here as a sort of euphemism for “hustle”/entrepreneurial/self-development culture. My irritation is no shock perhaps and I’ll admit my bias (a tiresome practice for such a universal and inescapable predilection to prejudice) in terms of my stereotypical “artist’s temperament”. While I’m definitely going to take aim at some “guru” types and go on the offensive, I do hope you’ll find the following gentle diatribe to be cheerfully dyspeptic and ultimately hopeful. After all, part of what is so very annoying about the trend I’m about to detail is that these damn people take themselves so seriously. I’ve oft suggested that in place of the idea of “seriousness” we put “sincerity”. As Mr. Chesterton once quipped, “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly”. It is a good thing to care about stuff. It is a manifestly bad thing to grasp so tightly at what is good that you choke the very life out of it.
I was given to pondering the fashion in question after reading “The Curse of the Eternal Present” by the inimitable Thomas J. Bevan. I recommend it highly (but keep reading here before you click that link, O ye of little focus!). I disagree with nothing in essence in his lovely essay, but want to look at a different angle of things. This desire, nay compulsion to complaint, was mostly born of a discussion (mockery, really) of the practice of “building a second brain”. Frankly, I’m a little tired of bitching about the evils of transhumanism in all its sundry permutations, but alas, it is our insidious zeitgeist and so if we’re to be sincere people interested in the Good Life we’ll probably just have to keep beating this horse. I don’t say dead horse, since the patently insane idea of transcending human limitation won’t seem to go away. It is of course, part and parcel of Original Sin, however literally you would like to take the story. So let’s take up our clubs and get to whacking. Maybe we can save few pitiful souls in the process who still think there’s some value in keeping copious notes on the masterworks of Napoleon Hill.
So, if you’re unfamiliar, the “second brain” idea is to offload all of the things you wish to remember to a highly systematic and easily navigable note taking and storage apparatus. Put less elaborately, its taking a shitload of notes and filing them in a “user-friendly” manner. There is, I’m sure, more to this practice that justifies the price one must pay in hard-earned legal tender to the proponents and developers of said system, but I refuse to look it up, since time is limited and I’m not convinced the practice per se is deserving of much nuance. Aside from the horridly cringe-inducing name for such a practice, there is so much wrong with the idea that it beggars belief. I’ll say at the outset that I keep a so-called commonplace book where I record random thoughts, ideas, quotations, dreams, irritations, smoker recipes, etc. There is nothing wrong with writing things down. Of course, there was some resistance from practitioners of the oral tradition to the tune that the technology of writing would obliterate our capacity for memory. There is some truth to this. However, by and large, I am “pro-“ writing stuff down. Hell, you’re reading something I wrote down.
A Half-Assed Theory of Memory
My quotation of Eliot above will serve two purposes. The first is that I have that snippet memorized. I wrote it down in the epigraph from memory and I can recite it on command. As a practicing Christian I have both personally important individual verses and even large section of the Bible memorized. When I was learning the practice of memorization, I went a bit overboard and, since I think it’s a cogent distillation of Christian Theology and practice, I have the entire book of Ephesians memorized from the King James Bible. I don’t say this to impress you, although if you’re the type that finds this impressive you’re certainly my type of fella or lady. I tell you about this for the simple reason that I learned to do this because these things are important to me. Ergo, I commit them to my memory. Maybe you’re not a believer in Christ as such, but there are certainly things that are important to you that you have committed to memory. Maybe it’s all the lyrics to the good My Chemical Romance album (it’s not Black Parade, by the way) or your Grandma’s killer chocolate chip cookie recipe.
Now, maybe you don’t know why the things that stick in memory of their own accord are important to you. There’s a clue there about what sort of creatures we are that we’ll also get to in the conclusion of this little romp. But suffice to say for now that we remember things by a process that isn’t exactly logical. We can of course systematize it, and I put in a good deal of work to get Ephesians to stick in my brain. But from the details I’ve given you thus far I want to draw a loosely-edged analytical framework for information. Let’s say that information that comes before us can be divided into three categories, namely: instantly and permanently committed to long-term memory, those bits that are impactful and memorably constructed but take some leg work and coaxing to make them stick, and things that are forgotten as soon as they are encountered.
I gave the quotation of Jesus from Luke’s Gospel for a perhaps unexpected reason. While there is much to dissect there in terms of religion, I popped it in above for the simple reason that it is jarring. The first time I heard it I was taken aback and I never forgot it. Even before I converted to Christianity it stuck with me as I tried to parse out exactly what He meant. I think if you read through the teachings of Jesus you’ll find this to be a recurring theme. What He says is darn near universally shocking. We have to consider that in first-century Palestine people were not showing up to His sermons with their little notebooks and recording what He said to ponder it over the wine later in the evening. Probably most of his hearers were illiterate. So, in the vein of all good rhetoric, it is instantly memorable. I challenge you to forget the saying that you should hate your parents. Of course He didn’t mean to literally hate them in the sense of wishing ill upon them. I won’t digress into what He meant, not least because perhaps I still yet do not fully understand the teaching, although I have solid idea about it I think. Staying on point, I think the reason the issue is framed in such stark terms is so that His disciples and hearers would not need any technological aid to keep the saying with them. It burns itself into your brain by its very nature.
There are lots of occurrences in our lives that function in this way, often tied to strong emotions. Usually they are more particular in nature to ourselves and not quite as universally applicable as Jesus’s saying. Maybe during a breakup, someone said something particularly hurtful to you and it will never leave you, at least until you grow enough to realize they were wrong. Or maybe they were right and it’s an opportunity for character development. Really what I’m banging on about is that there is good reason certain information leaves an instant mental tattoo on our thought-life. I mean “good” as in sufficient, because of course the reason could just be that you don’t much like yourself and have stored away the breakup insult in question in order to endlessly torture yourself over it. Unwise to be sure, but I accuse you of dishonesty if you say you’ve never done this. If it be the case, let’s just pray we can heal up well enough to leave some of those things behind. For there is a reason we forget things too.
I Forget
I don’t remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. I actually can’t recall even if I make an effort. It’s just not important to me. Now, this is a mundane example and unless one has a memory bordering on eidetic, it’s probably fairly common for us not to remember such things. But the point I’m making is we don’t remember things like that because they have no value to us. It doesn’t enrich me in any way to bring it to mind, and there’s no particular strong emotion attached to it to activate whatever synapses need to fire to make the necessary imprint required of Lady Mnemosyne. Well and good. But here’s the core of my distaste of the quest for a “second brain”. What if the reason we can’t remember stuff is that it’s useless garbage that we have no need to remember in the first place?
Now, here we get into the weeds a bit with type-2 (takes some work but is good) and type-3 (easily forgotten rubbish) information in the paradigm I pulled out of nowhere just a moment ago. We need to use our reasoning capacity to determine what information we’re confronted with merits commitment to memory. This takes some discernment, which is a virtue par excellence in our deceptively named “information age”. Taking for granted now that some things simply stick with us of their own accord, we can spend a little time dissecting the reasoning behind which tasty morsels of info we incorporate into our being and which are so much junk food to be resolutely binned.
A Short Philosophical Detour (Come on, it’s me. What did you expect?)
To really nail this part of things down we need to draw a distinction between information, knowledge, and wisdom. Information is more or less a set of facts or data. It’s the “stuff” of thought, roughly speaking. There’s no accounting initially for its truth-value. If I tell you the sky is green, that’s a piece of information. Unless there is some meteorological phenomenon of which I’m unaware that causes this coloration, we can agree that it’s a false piece of information. But it’s a piece of information notwithstanding its truth.
So, knowledge is information that we are certain is true, on the basis of appropriate thought and experience. Without a full-blown foray into epistemology, let’s just clear up that definition a bit and move on. You know something if you can interact with or practice it in the real world according to how things are. A concrete example is probably in order. Let’s say your car. Barring any malfunction with your fuel gauge or the engine itself, if there is gas in the car, you know that it will start and carry you where you’re going. I can give you information to the contrary and you can still trust the car to go, because you know which information is correct based on experience and logical deduction about the function of said vehicle. Good enough.
Now, if we are sincere (I’m gonna jam that one into common usage if it kills me) people committed to living well, what we are really after is wisdom. This will be two for two in my recent writing of referencing the great Dallas Willard, but he had the best definition I’ve ever seen for “wisdom”. He said, “wisdom is the settled disposition of the soul to act in accordance with knowledge”.
The aim when we are presented with information is to determine whether it has the potential to become knowledge. Can we determine its truth-value? And if so, would it be of benefit to us? I don’t mean benefit in the standard economic or self-help sense of making us more “successful”, but rather whether it is enriching or impoverishing in the broad sense. This could mean in material well-being, but also the heart, soul, mind, and so on. Then, if we are wise, we have worked to become the kind of people that naturally, and with not too much effort, act on the knowledge we have acquired.
It follows that the proper stance in dealing with information is to discern if it can lead to wisdom by way of knowledge. Our initial goal in handling information would be to transmute it into knowledge. Memory is a tremendous aid in this regard, as it allows us to have an intimacy with the data that mere notetaking does not. It is just fine in my estimation to externalize this process to a certain degree, but we have to be careful not to go off the rails. I think the “second brain” idea hasn’t just gone off the rails, but lost sight completely of the destination and careened toward a spiritual cliff.
Mental Hoarding
That’s what I think this “second brain” nonsense is. Mental hoarding. I’m not venturing a comprehensive psychological theory of hoarding, but it seems to me at a glance to be FOMO writ large across the human personality. Sure, I hate that acronym with a passion, but “fear of missing out” is an all-too-accurate diagnosis of one of our pressing modern malaises. The person who hoards lives with the constant anxiety that they might someday need all the garbage they have accumulated. That there is some all-important “thing” that they will miss if they simply let go. Extrapolated to the sphere of information, this sickness becomes even more malignant.
The nature of information these days, in terms of sheer volume, means that you will miss out on something. Actually, you will miss out on most of it. And that’s okay. In fact, it is good.
The attempt to capture and preserve every bit of potentially useful or interesting information you come across is quite literally crazy. And impossible. And while high aspirations can be noble, the stubborn attempt to do what can’t be done isn’t heroic. It’s stupid. And dangerous.
I say dangerous because the very act of collecting endless bits of information with no attempt to dwell on them discerningly in the attempt to acquire knowledge and then wisdom destroys your ability to make distinctions about what is important. If everything is worth saving, nothing is.
I realize that these external note-taking systems probably have prioritization methods built into them but what is the heuristic? How are you to know what is worth remembering without a clear standard of wisdom-value? And we do well to remember that wisdom has its basis in Reality as it is, not in a futile attempt to escape it. For that’s what all this “second-brain” nonsense is about. The sick desire to transcend human limitation by extending ourselves into the world of machines.
If information cannot become knowledge that cannot become wisdom acted out in our day-to-day lives, then it is by definition useless. And the accumulation of useless things is what hoarding is. Externalizing it is not reducing clutter in your mind, so much as it is increasing the potential for clutter beyond all imagining. Are you really going to go back and read all that crap you stored up? And if you did, what are you then going to do with it? Improve yourself? Why? How? To what end?
These aren’t insignificant questions. At a certain point you’ve got to just let go and live your life. What happens when you’ve stored up all the Stoic secrets and business tips and positive affirmations you can stand? Are you any better at loving people, or doing what’s Right, or being able to drink a coffee quietly without your thoughts racing and racing?
Maybe some of these folks are basically monks at total peace with themselves and the world. I doubt it. The behaviors they exhibit in this arena strike me as profoundly neurotic. I’ve said before that this hustle culture stuff is all basically a boring modern Gnosticism. Someday I’ll get the secret knowledge that lets me transcend this human nonsense and become perfect. Well, no such thing exists. Knowledge and wisdom can only increase our power to be more of what we are by nature, not become something else that’s somehow vaguely “better”.
The Joy of Forgetting
Now we come to my chosen title for this excursion. I imply in the alternate title that what is truly important is of the type-1 category that I detailed above. It makes an overwhelming and permanent impression on our minds. However, I don’t think that this means it’s always constantly in our conscious experience. There is an amount of truth to the computer metaphor for our brains and the idea of RAM. You can only think about so many things at once. And as an aside, I plead with you to recognize that it’s a metaphor. You’re not a computer.
There are then varying degrees of depth at which other memories exist in our psyches. With type-2 sort of information you can have some willful control over what gets lodged in there. And the deep, deep stuff can be outside your awareness entirely until you confront it in experience. You know what it’s like to hear a song you forgot existed or see a movie pop up on streaming that was buried with your childhood? It’s a wonderful feeling.
But I’d argue that the deepest knowledge and wisdom is the stuff we don’t really even know that we know. This is why I take it on faith that if I can’t capture every great idea that floats through the stream of my mind that everything is going to be okay. By some metaphysical principle I don’t quite understand, life keeps bringing before you the things you really need to know and pay attention to. For me, I think this is Divine Providence, God teaching and showing me what I need. But even to the more agnostic among us, I think you’ll find that life keeps putting information in front of you that you need, until you commit to turning it into knowledge and finally wisdom. In many ways this life is a training ground for who we are becoming. And that’s the end we should have in mind when encountering information. Not “what can I get out of this?”, but “how can this change me so that I can give more, serve more?”. This “second-brain” nonsense is an attempt to strip-mine life and texts to enlarge myself. It is a vain attempt to be superhuman in which I eventually degrade myself into something less than human. A cruel irony to be sure, but one easily avoided.
How exactly do we avoid it? Just forget about stuff. Don’t worry about recording every jot and tittle of your experience and every bit of text you read. There’s of course a wise way to walk the razor’s edge here and take down what needs to be taken down, and commit the real pearls to your memory (“know by heart” as we say). But honestly, just stop trying to grasp at everything. It’s a fool’s errand and only leads to dying alone in your mental house filled with filing cabinets of tips and tricks and quotes. Perhaps even a literal packed house depending on how crazy you get with this stuff.
And now we come to the second use of the Eliot quote. When we really see the knowledge and wisdom in a piece of information, it feels like remembering, even if it’s new. You see, on a deep level I think we all kind of know what life’s about. We’re trying to get back to the Garden. There’s a memory in us of that perfect life and the wise truths that leave that indelible mark on our souls are the memory of that place, regardless of how allegorical you think I’m being right now. There’s a shock of recognition that requires no recording when we confront the capital-“T” Truth.
And yet we keep exploring because that’s what we are. The wise path is to come to terms with what we are and grow into that full potential, not set it aside for a silly ideal. And when we get that glimpse of the Garden in the Truth, it feels like home. We say “ah yes, I remember this”. I only but forgot for a moment. What a great joy in having forgot in order to remember again.
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Great essay. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that it can know something just by writing it down. Neil Postman begins 'Technopoly' by reciting the legend of Thamus and Theuth, in which Thamus warns of the ills that practice of writing with befall on those who take it up, "Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources." As it sounds like you do, I believe in the mind's capacity to regulate itself. A 'second brain' is a made up term. There is no second brain; a database is not a brain. When you build a second brain, it sounds as though you do so by taking out the one you already have, removing it from where it belongs. There, now you have your second brain. But what happened to your first?
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
I’ve always loved this quote, and it echoes your idea of the ‘deepest’ wisdom being so ingrained that we are no longer aware of it.
I agree that the traditional “second brain” ideology is hopelessly misguided and misleading. It’s a trap I fell into a while ago. That said, there are related systems that I think you have unfairly lumped with the second brain, and therefore dismissed. Zettelkasten for example, which, rather than a practical storage system, functions as an interlocutor of sorts, or perhaps a thinking machine: it is a tool that bases its usefulness on the principle that clear writing is clear thinking. I have used it in an undisciplined manner for two years, and concluded that it is enormously helpful for a more structured, logical, or argumentative piece (which, at its most extreme, is academic writing). Writing in this context doesn’t replace memory, but rather acts as a tool for understanding, an essential precursor to memory.
On the whole I think it is impossible to disagree with you, but I do think there is more to ‘other side’ than you give credit. If you disagree, I’d love to hear your refutation. I haven’t made up my mind on this.