Knowledge As Consumption
A 6-minute read
As I mentioned in my Now Page update, something rather unexpected has occurred to me: I've begun to find my interest in gorging on non-fiction has greatly waned.
For much of my life, I'd neglected fiction in favour of what I considered practical reading. I didn't oppose fiction, but it was my "bit on the side" so to speak; a guilty pleasure, a wanton lover, a libertine seducer I dabbled with merely in my downtime. And "downtime" was a rare state typically induced by ineludible illness that sapped the last drop of my childlike hyperactivity.
Yet, recently, my desire to sate every curiosity—to fill my head with more information than any one human could possibly need, to understand any concept or idea even mildly interesting—has atrophied. No, that's not quite a just word; it evokes the idea of something that has grown sickly and weak due to neglect or burden. I suppose a more fitting word may be something like… subsided. Like a manic period of teenage infatuation that dissolved when the honeymoon phase finally passed. And I suspect this subsidence may relate to my recent avoidance of the internet.
A while ago, my spouse and I had decided to limit all internet to no more than one hour per day each. Save, of course, for highly important things such as work, looking up addresses, replying to family, and so on. I thought I would struggle with it more than I did, but I had never been a particularly "internetified" person to begin with, considering I didn't have social media and quick entertainment has never been particularly interesting to me. My spouse had more trouble, but overcame it much quicker than they had expected and has seen the same benefits and growth, if not more. And here's the curious thing: we prophesied that an hour would be too little, even for practical matters, and our frustration would only turn us back quicker to relying on quick answers and search engines. But we were wrong. Interestingly, I rarely use my full hour.
Breaking the habit of looking up every idle curiosity, deep diving into spur-of-the-moment interests, and catching up with geopolitical events has led me to realise that much of what I thought was necessary or important was, in great measure… superfluous. Even learning can become mindless consumption, the struggle for more, more, and more. Many hold the opinion that there can never be too much learning, too much knowledge, too much education—and indeed I have hitherto been a lifelong advocate of this mindset myself—but a universal truth I find myself returning to persistently is that nothing is healthy in excess. That's what makes it excess. And we tend to lose sight of what is excessive when indulging on that of which becomes labelled "healthy". (A label contemporarily oft weaponised to keep us hooked on consumption, indulgence, and immoderation).
Though my avarice for knowledge and gluttony for novelty have long driven my behaviour, underneath I've found a person who is startlingly comfortable with limits; I just had to obey the rules to understand them, so to say. And what I've found underneath this revelation, as it were, is that my curiosity is far more focused these days. I tend to know exactly what I want or need to know, and why I want or need to know it. I get a better sense of what is worth knowing, and what is merely sidetracking me away from depth. And I realise that if something truly interests me, I'll pick up a book on the topic; if I don't, I probably wasn't as interested as I thought (at least not presently).
So now, when I'm spending my hour on the internet, it's typically geared towards focussed research, which I can download for offline reading later if necessary, or exploring topics of which I've found a persistent and deep interest within myself—many of which I'd been unwittingly cultivating for years, but had never sharpened to a fine point due to constantly allowing myself to be pulled in all directions. Moreover, my book reading time has expanded (unintentionally) to fill the extra space, at least that of which novel writing hasn't already claimed. It's safe to say that my priorities, values, and (actual) interests have never been clearer than present, now I'm not inundated with white noise.
To circle back, how I believe this feeds into my gradual pulling away from non-fiction is that the distance from ravenous knowledge consumption has made me realise how rife the field of non-fiction truly is with nonsense—especially today. I confess, the realisation is not new for me, though it is much deeper and more viscerally understood than before (my criteria for "nonsense" has merely expanded). The few books that have something worth saying are typically timeless classics, authoritative textbooks, or suspiciously niche and unknown. That's not to dismiss all non-fiction and popular interest books, but rather I'm calling out the sea of redundancy in which genuinely good books drown. (I don't pretend to be equipped with any active solution, mind you).
And this falling out of love with non-fiction, has brought my faded courtesan, fiction, to the forefront. I'd be remiss to say that fiction is somehow a higher form of writing than non-fiction, when in fact it is arguably a category, if not on par with the non-fiction market, more blisteringly swollen with tripe and codswallop. Genre fiction has never particularly been my preference, and likely never will be, but literary fiction can also find itself high on its own reputation with ostentatious displays of pretension and sentimentality for the sake of it (another form of excessive consumption, in reality)—collecting awards for feeling like it's important while having said nothing really at all. But I've always thought that a good book can, should, and will change the reader, and something about me in recent times has been drawn to learning something experientially, rather than theoretically—and not pragmatic and immediately useful knowledge as before, but something more innate and inexplicable. Something psychological? Spiritual? Emotional? I don't know what specifically, but broadly speaking, something—at least—universally and fundamentally human.