"MARIA POPOVA — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age"

“We seem to be bored with thinking. We want to instantly know… We’ve been infected with a kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it… The only thing to glean from skimming is trivia, and the only way to gain knowledge is contemplation. And the road to that is just time. There is no shortcut…

For me, I try to discern between information and wisdom…

Going to bed and feeling like the day happened, like the day was lived, there is nothing more than that really.”

 http://www.onbeing.org/program/maria-popova-cartographer-of-meaning-in-a-digital-age/7580

And there are so many more little gems that just casually pour out of her mouth.

I want to think about this, because I feel like it’s true but I feel like instead of sort of a moral-pathology-of-the-youths, I feel like it’s something that has been imposed on me. I feel like the expectations for the 90s and 2000s child (and for the 2010s child too, I’m sure) were such that it didn’t feel like there was every enough time for anything, really. There is this constant sense of being behind on checking boxes, there is no attention pointed to any kind of journey. There’s the montage toward that end scene where we have mastered the skill or transformed ourselves.

I think we are a generation seeking a productive, transformative montage.