Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

by Evan Puschak

Discovering a love of learning felt like a rebirth. That nagging sense of pointlessness yielded to a promise of substance in every direction. The world lit up with questions, and questions generated questions. It’s an exhilarating and terrifying experience to walk the road of your ignorance. Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but of watching it shrink against all there is to know. It’s humbling but addicting. I followed that addiction into a new life, free from GPA anxiety, off the checkpointed path. It made college more enriching, but it went beyond that. Reading no longer felt like a chore. I hopscotched from book to book, chasing enthusiasms that moved faster than I could. I found new passions and complex ideas and finer shades of meaning.

This framing lines up with me so much.

we learn by expressing, not by thinking, which is to say that knowledge doesn’t really exist until you can write it down.

To achieve great things, we first need to believe we’re capable of great things.

Apple builds the shiniest, most addictive and useful tool in human history, then installs an app that’s supposed to help us use it less?

Maybe don’t build a device that’s designed to boost dependency, then, on that same device, piously offer us a bit of software to break that dependency. Tools like that are hair dryers against a hurricane. The modern world is built to obliterate restraint, and technology enthusiastically leads the charge.

In the third quarter of 2020, Facebook posted $21.5 billion in revenue, of which $21.2 billion was advertising revenue, or 98.6 percent!

Not all content consumption is passive. Good books, films, journalism, videos, podcasts, etc., encourage you to think critically. When you’ve finished a book or an album, there should be a period of time for you to reflect on what you’ve experienced. You should have a break to let your mind wander, to examine your response, to write your thoughts down, to discuss them with others. That’s one reason I love seeing movies at the theater. We talk about preserving the communal experience of watching movies, but what about when the movie ends, that ritual of slowly getting up, emerging into the lobby, and waiting until someone finally says, “So what did you think?” The conversation that follows, in the car ride home or over drinks at a bar, is what makes the passive viewing experience active. The internet isn’t interested in those gaps, those moments of reflection or conversation.

The modern world obliterates restraint. The internet obliterates the time between experiences.

ingesting information is only half of learning. The other half, the more important half, is responding to that information, thinking critically about it, about what it implies. Does it fit with your worldview? If not, why not? This is the part of learning that turns knowledge into wisdom, into action.

the essential skill in today’s world is not so much learning as filtering, sifting through those who claim to be knowledgeable about a subject, then choosing whom to believe.

There’s a sublime sense of unity in a close group of friends, a sense of belonging, of relaxation, of not having to put on an act.