"If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise" -- William Blake, Proverbs of Hell.
I have been thinking about this quote a lot lately, when reflecting on what I learned in 2021. At the beginning of 2021, I believed I would be able to travel and return to "normal life" by May, or maybe June at the latest. However, the pandemic never truly came under control, and my plans were somewhat curtailed. So I spent a year making stone soup of sorts, trying to broaden my horizons with the limited resources I had available.
And some of those things were kind of silly. I wrote write-ups about things like comic books, 45 RPM records that I bought for a quarter each, Ace Double Novels, and books that I found at The Dollar Tree (and one of the reasons for Dollar Tree shopping was that it was a place where I could stock up on a lot of staples for cheap, and find a book or two to keep me occupied). Sure, I also found some serious literature, such as All the Names and The Double, by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago (which I found in a Little Free Library), but much of what I read was driven by necessity. So what have I learned by obsessively cataloging pop culture detritus? Well, more than I can say. During November and Iron Noder, I hit 40 writeups (although, of course, some of those were low on content. In December, I decided to see if I could repeat at least 30 writeups, and it turned out that I could. And that period of activity made me think about, and realize many different things. Not as a direct consequence, but just as part of the process of writing about things, I came to a deeper understanding of the world, and also invented a way to do arithmetic with transfinite numbers. Does that seem like a silly thing to say? Well, check the quote at the top.
To be serious, though, we are constantly bombarded by messages, at various points along a spectrum from innocent to sinister. One of the reasons why we are now entering the third year of a deadly pandemic, with some of the blame going to a societal problem with being unable to filter out bad and malicious information and propaganda. Yesterday, as a joke, I wrote several paragraphs about a snack I ate. But I also take these things seriously: by examining the social contexts that even small things are presented to me with, I realize how much my conscious and experiences are constructed. My thesis here, in serious terms: if anyone takes 30 minutes to explain a common phenomenon or experience in a structured way, they will start realizing things that are both useful and enjoyable. And so that is my challenge for the year, our collective path back to sanity: pick something to experience and explain, enjoy looking at it from different angles, and see what you learn from it. No matter how silly it seems at first, you will get somewhere with it.