Birds that didn't learn how to fly

I watched a video essay this morning on YouTube. It was about nine minutes long. The guy struck me as kind of cool - just sitting there, talking and sipping his coffee, with a shelf of Harvard Classics in the background. He went on about how reading the classics helps build a man, and how not reading hinders our ability to create anything of true substance.

I think the part I liked most was when he said that 'books highlight greatness that is worth pursuing, giving us something to aim for. A benchmark to level up, too.' Now, I’ll come back to that last line in a moment.

He then shifted to the antithesis: what kind of men are being built without books? He listed a few: desire without discipline, opinions without original thought, ambition without direction... and so on.

Actually, I want to build on that first one: desire without discipline.

'We have desire without discipline because we rarely deny ourselves anything' - especially the relief of discomfort.

That thought stayed with me the whole day. While I sat in the office, staring at a bill of quantities spreadsheet. Until I got home, cooked dinner, fed the dog, and now, finally, here I am, in front of my computer.

I think it would be a waste not to write this down now, before I go to sleep. No - I don’t want to write it tomorrow, or the tomorrow that comes after, or the one after that. Because tomorrow, I’ll feel differently. And with different feelings come different thoughts.

Going back on that discomfort. We've all probably seen that on others or perhaps on ourselves how we quickly dismiss obscurity, as if shunning it were absolutely necessary.

'Is brushing your teeth three times a day beneficial?' - searched on google.
'How to know if I’m thinking too much?' - typed into Reddit or ChatGPT.
'What does ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’ mean?' - back to google again.

Why the rush to resolve something instantly? Whether they're stupidly simple or intellectually stimulating questions, it doesn't matter. The truth is we've become so averse to discomfort that we've lost the ability to endure difficulty for the sake of growth. We constantly deny ourselves the possibility for greatness. Greatness that comes from a mind trained in analysis and perseverance.

I’m not pretending I’m above it. Believe me, I’ve googled one of those questions myself. So this is also a message for me. But I've also experienced the payoff of pushing through. Although it wasn't really grand, the satisfaction of figuring something out on your own feels way more meaningful than that quick dopamine hit.

Take Hegel, for example, his texts, as we all know, are very dense. Say you start with his basics, his short essay Who Thinks Abstractly? My first reading was very uncomfortable, because when I read the first few sentences I understood so little.

Sadly, it took me days to return to it and sit with the discomfort and overcome ambiguity.

To think abstractly, in Hegel's view, is to think in a vacuum. Where one only sees a single, simplistic version of a story and disregarding other aspects that make up the whole - like a man's complete personhood. Whereas, concrete thinking is seeing the whole, living reality. In his example,it means seeing the murderer not only as a murderer but as a whole person, with a history, a childhood, social relations, and unique circumstances that contributed to the act. Conversely, abstract thinking can also involve taking a rather trivial matter and overcomplicating it, stripping it of its simple, concrete reality.

It's just puzzling at first because Hegel uses the word 'abstract' way differently than we do now. Abstract thinking is an oversimplified thinking. At least that's how I understood it. I welcome any corrections.

So basically, to deny Hegel is to deny our minds the mental exercise they desperately need to strengthen their capacity for complex thought. That's 'leveling up' - choosing discomfort that builds us whether intellectually, physically, emotionally etc. over the comfort that keeps us stagnant.

I believe we are all deep thinkers, all capable of deep thinking, if we’d only give ourselves the chance.
But instead of learning to soar higher, we choose to stay grounded, burying ourselves in distractions, instant gratification, and quick solutions, and so we stay low. Too low.

^{Thornton Dial - The End of November: The Birds That Didn't Learn How to Fly (2007)}