Why Bother Learning Anything?

Your basic run-of-the-mill reason for learning anything at all is so that you can live a better life. The more you learn, the better your life is likely to be. You can improve your mental health so you enjoy life more, become financially stable (and loaded), work a job you actually enjoy, have a career doing fun stuff, become an independent adult with a good living situation and no one else calling the shots, have a lifestyle that is perfect for you, etc. But here are some other reasons:

11/10/22 You graduate (from wherever) and get a pretty piece of paper to gain more money and social benefits. Which is fine, but that's only one area of your life that benefits. You actually learn things in order to improve your overall quality of life in every area of it. Every last one. Especially if anything is fucked in any specific part of it? Education is more likely to un-fuck your life than for instance New Age stuff like psychic readings or (laughing at self) my religion, any religion, more moneys, positive thinking, and so on... except for therapy. Therapy's pretty much on par with education.
The number one benefit of learning stuff is learning that it's okay to think, losing the fear of thinking, and losing the fear of thinking for yourself. In a lot of places in the world the latter three things are absolutely taboo. This is a form of mental slavery that is best broken out of.
New Rule (guideline? often-true thing?) I'd like to propose: the less you think you need more education, the more you need it
It's not embarrassing to not know something or take a lot longer to learn it than your peers. What's embarrassing is giving up on trying to learn it and then insisting on staying ignorant. I call it "the stupid," but it's my personal term for ignorance. And if you don't fear it as much as I do, better hope and pray you don't wind up living through reasons to fear it like I do.
7/18/22 Not killing innocent people or ruining lives is a pretty good reason. Places where people are uneducated, willfully ignorant, and/or just straight-up against original thinking are very good at killing people and ruining the lives of everyone else. Why? They value comfort over freedom and they value conformity over the truth. Which is comforting and all, for the people in the cult, except for the small problem that places where such an attitude is the norm are historically and currently infamous for killing people. Lots, and lots of innocent people in the cult, bystanders just passing through the area, people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in general just large swaths of the local population. They're also known for making life extremely hard in these places, even to the point of mental health crises happening at a far higher rate than expected, and otherwise ruining lives of everyone who is unlucky enough to be in these areas. This is all completely avoidable with enough education, but no, they'd rather suffer. Pro-life? (Frolic by Luciano Michelini plays)
Freedom and power are two other major reasons. If you want to have more of a say in how your life goes, as opposed to having it dictated to you from outside of you, then getting educated for real can help you a lot.
If you ever plan on having children or if you already have them, this review of multiple studies shows that the more education you have, the better their chances of survival are. Source: Eureka Alert, American Association for the Advancement of Science It backs up the common sense that the smarter you are the better you can protect your family.
Can help stave off dementia and increase gray matter as opposed to say, decreasing it by watching too much TV
There is an entire album which is a masterwork, which contains a good track called Upgrade that you should listen to Deltron 3030
Learning the truth is often seen as terrifying, and sometimes it is. But it is also often a revelation, filled with wonder and joy. It also has some kind of link to freedom. Not sure exactly how that works but it does. All I know is that in my experience lies strip you of your freedom, and the bigger the lie, the worse the bondage. Self-deception is bad, you guys.
It is not generally well known that the way to get smarter and more educated is simply a combination of two factors: courage and persistence. People tend to believe the level of intelligence and education you've got is set from birth. This is provably false. I've seen it proven false over and over and over again. Heck, the discovery of neuroplasticity says it's false. If you don't believe me, prove it to yourself. I mean, if you, like me, were taunted from a very young age and told repeatedly how stupid you were, how much of a weak loser, etc. combined with failing miserably at things you really wanted to succeed at, then it's easy to internalize that, but that doesn't mean it's true. Keep grinding at what you want to learn, because even if you aren't obviously a born genius, you can overcome that hurdle by being very very persistent. Sooner than you think, you'll look at all your achievements and realize you left the haters in the dust a long time ago. Soon after that, chances are good you won't even care, let alone have the past on your mind.
The common belief is that intellectuals and smart people are born not made. However, over the past 20 plus years of my experience, what I have noticed is that legions of people that I met actually were quite brilliant despite seeming dumb, and made some genius-level decisions, deductions, and creations without even realizing it. They were usually just not that educated. Then, the instant something they did "seemed" smart, such as using big words, they immediately pretended they didn't know what they were talking about. They then proceeded to pretend to be stupid the rest of the time and not only the rest of the world but they themselves believed it. No, what I have seen going on is that these folks, and I mean like 90% of the people I've met, had convinced themselves, and I was once one of them too, that avoiding intellectualism would help them survive in a world full of anti-intellectualism. But that paradigm doesn't work any more, and pretending you are stupid in order to fit in with a bunch of other people also pretending to be stupid in order to conform to the social normal is literally killing us. So don't do that to yourself, and allow yourself to try to think as intelligently as you can, and allow yourself to try to be as smart as you can. And I mean all the time. It's the not trying to do these things that's a problem. And in a lot of cases it's also the not trying to do these things all the time that's a problem; brain turn on for one tiny task, brain turn off for the rest of the time (WHY). Most importantly, allow yourself to think critically, ALONE, unplugged from society's borg groupthink. Because despite how it might have looked for a while, being an idiot on purpose is actually not worth it.
If you find yourself making stupid mistakes, getting frustrated when trying to learn something, and generally making the 90s dial-up noise in your brain, that's really good. It means you're learning, not coasting. Would you even be working out if you couldn't feel it? Same deal.
Do you want good things like happiness, health, wealth, love, luck, opportunity, and success? Learn! Chances are very good that you can get exactly what you want if you learn enough of the right topics.
Learning is actually fun if you let it be fun. Once you're no longer in an institution of "learning," and have the freedom to learn whatever you like, that's when you can learn stuff that actually interests you and blows your mind. Core topics like science and math may be harder to get into initially but when you see how much cool stuff you can do with them, you might just get hooked.
Knowledge is power, opportunity, freedom, safety, and potential all in one. Funny how people obsess over dollar bills as if they were worth as much as knowledge. In terms of value, it's not even close. Why? Take a look around you. It's the reason we aren't in the Dark Ages anymore, living in thatched roof wattle-and-daub cottages with rushlights and pigs in the backyard, hoping not to be wiped out by another Plague or the whim of a corrupt monarch. People who decided to deliberately ignore the opportunity to learn anything have ruined absolutely everything and now many places are starting to look like the Dark Ages.
Conversely, ignorance is weakness, danger, and potentially disastrous. Exhibit A: 2020. People who are proud to be ignorant are proud to be unable to adequately defend themselves or their families from the fickle winds of fate, because that is what being ignorant does.
You don't know what you don't know, and what you don't know can hurt you. In fact, it could even ruin your life. A baseline level of knowledge thus functions as insurance, to keep some of the worse things at bay so you don't wind up suffering.
Learning even one new subject very well opens up new horizons and opportunities if you delve into that subject deeply enough. Case in point, learn Chemistry well enough and you'll be able to make your own household cleaning products from scratch. Learn agricultural science well enough and you can theoretically convert a large backyard into a farming operation so you never need to buy food again. Learn the science basics such as chemistry, math, and physics and you can learn engineering, and then build your own off-grid home so you never need to pay for utilities ever again. That's the thing though, you have to actually master the basics well enough so that you can get to that point, and the basics can be boring. Keep going. It gets better.
The more you learn, the more incredibly stupid you realize you really are. This is a blessing in disguise, because it keeps you from making poor decisions out of arrogance and teaches you humility. And yes, just in case you thought I was trying to be mean to you or something, I know just how stupid I really am: Very, and I have evidence to prove it XD
The major benefit of widespread as in worldwide free education is this: you ever hear that famous saying about if you leave either an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters in a room or leave them there for an infinite amount of time, one will eventually write the works of Shakespeare? We are those monkeys. And the more of us learn how to type, the more likely it is we'll get good stuff like Shakespeare. The better we learn how to type, the more likely. But we are better than monkeys at coming up with innovative stuff, so the likelihood of getting breakthrough innovations that change the world goes up dramatically when more of us are educated, and the more educated the better.
The more you learn, the more ahead of your time you are. And why would you want to be a part of whatever dark ages the human race is currently going through? Yeah, you'll lose friends, but the people who care about living well (instead of wallowing in misery and blaming other people for their problems) will listen to what you're saying, and in every lousy area, there's usually one or two. Besides, you'll probably be too rich and happy to care about what most people think. Some would say this is sociopathy. It isn't if you aren't harming innocent people. Sociopathy is wallowing in your misery and blaming other people for your problems, often demanding help from them to clean up the mess you made, instead of getting educated and fixing as many of your own problems as you can. Of course, there's always a middle ground solution, where you hide your big-brain-developing hobbies from everyone you know in order to not be misunderstood. That's probably the best idea for now.
It has been my experience that anyone who thinks they're "smart" tends to be a hell of a lot more stupid than they could be because they turned off their wonder and desire to learn more; their capacity for intellectual growth. Not to mention such people tend to be dangerously wrong a lot of the time. Even Newton said that his discoveries were like that of a person finding pretty seashells on the beach but not comprehending the entire ocean. Anyway, continual learning prevents this problem because of the constant humiliation you run up against when you're in over your head, and when you're truly learning, you get that feeling a lot of the time.

Big Brain Time

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