How valuable is it to study something that is just temporary? • Hacker News Board

Post by aDeveloperCase » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 11:12 AM UTC

I was about to start a 4 years free course path into biology.

Suddenly this question crossed my mind. Let's say it's not because of career improvement, earning a degree, starting a business, making a big discovery in science for the rest of the humankind or similar but just to quench the thirst for knowledge.

Now imagine you are a 120 years old man or woman and you are about to die, would it really matter to know all about your biological body you are about to leave anyway? Or like instead of going out in a sunny day you spend your days learning about the sun with astronomy books.

It's like someone is giving you a video game console and instead of playing with your friends you decide to spend more time trying to reverse engineering the components of it just to learn how a console is done. And at some point someone is going to get that console away from you, so you will not be able to use it or study it anymore.

With this in mind it seems more important to just enjoy the physical world as it is until we are able to do it rather than learning how it works.

Also maybe when we die we are going to get all the knowledge of the universe in any case or we just forget about the previous world, or we join a completely different permanent dimension with completely different rules and the mortal world doesn't matter anymore.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

(I'll probably start the course anyway but I'm not as much convinced as when I decided to start it.)

Post by hos234 » Sat, Nov 02, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

Learning is like walking through a jungle. The more you walk the more you see. You can always stop walking and sit down and just appreciate whats around you or decide you have seen enough, but after some time it gets very boring.

And when people are bored and can't come up with things to do by themselves, they just end up doing what others tell them to do. And then they complain about how annoying that is because its not what they want to do.

The key is to be "conscious", at all stages of your life, about the things that spark your interests. Most people don't know what their interests are because they have been walking through life, without noting down and then thinking about the different things that spark their interests.

Once you know your interests, you automatically start looking for book/tools/teachers/teammates to help you dig deeper. And then things snowball. That leads to new routes and new interests. But if you stop walking all that never happens.