Be more curious, actually
When you ask people how to best build your personal brand, they'll recommend consistency, finding one's niche, becoming if not an opinion, at least a thought-leader.
When you ask people what you should learn, it's usually related to paving the way for your future career aspirations or, at least, something that seems immediately useful.
I too fell into these traps at first.
I am sure it works for some, but it didn't for me.
When I started working in crypto, all I wrote were introductions to new token projects, and the occasional more in-depth post on issues we face, or simple experiences with trying to do stuff that seems easy at first, but turned out to not be (finding out the storage location of your NFT metadata).
In a similar vein, as I tried to figure out what I should study in university, I first went for a bachelor's in tourism management because I assumed that, as long as it's got management, I'd go places.
Are these two things related? I think so.
They both judge the way we approach our own life, and presentation thereof from a stancepoint of biggest utility, and the security of outcome.
A brand of my self would, by extension always also be a reflection of the things I studied.
Funny enough, tough, even in my early 20s, I realized that I just didn't have a whole lot of passion for management or anything remotely related to bookkeeping or org charts.
Instead, I loved languages. I quit the tourism management school, moved 800km across Germany, and started from scratch studying Intercultural linguistics, a field that would lead to constantly having to deal with the question of:
But what are you going to do profesionally? How will you sustain yourself?
The tragedy of education in our age is that it's largely framed as a means to an end. University isn't a place to indulge your curiosity, it's a place that serves as a stepping stone to rising the ranks in our supposed meritocracies.
This mindset extends beyond institutional education. A few years ago, we were suddenly all encouraged to learn how to code. Not because that'd be great for human flourishing by and large, or our quality of life, but that's what promised you the quick hack to get hired. Or even build your own startup.
"Knowledge everywhere is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad human outlook on life itself, but as merely an ingredient in technical skills"
Bertrand Russel in Useless Knowledge
I'm glad I never had the money for any of those boot camps. A friend gifted me a Scrimba subscription, and I made it to intermediate Front-end before I quit. I knew that coding just wasn't for me, and no potential reward could ever compensate for that feeling.
I did a bunch of Hubspot courses and completed a Marketing MiniMBA back in the days when I believed that the next step in my career should be managing a marketing team. I've largely abandoned that idea because the prospect of constantly being in meetings scares me.
Eventually, I kind of burned out writing about crypto projects. It became repetitive, and it started boring me. This is when I let go of the idea of needing to be consistent in my "personal brand."
After all, what's a personal blog if not the place to write about whatever the f*ck currently interests me?
As Emerson reminds us, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and why wouldn't we take his advice?
What's there to lose anyway?
Life feels shallow and empty? Maybe it's because much of our time is spent with passive consumption, and not much room for real leisure or play.
The ancient Greek philosophers would probably be appalled at the kind of lives we lead. A life not contemplated wasn't worth living to them, but to us, we're seemingly constantly chasing something, or trying to kill the time we tried to save so hard.
When all our time is spent advancing our skills further toward becoming better workers, how much is left for what interests us? Isn't that a form of alienation, too?
"The compulsion of work and performance intensify the profanation of life."
Byung Chul Han
How is that freedom? Liberation? I find it weird how these days we celebrate outsourcing much of our agency. Certain people will talk with pride about their "brain rot" and their inability to focus. They'll rarely ever leave their feeds, the algorithmic complacency is going strong.
The antidote to all that I've found?
Being curious and asking yourself questions. Finding time offline and just thinking about random shit. Even if it's deemed useless by people. Especially then. It's radical to learn stuff that's not directly conducive to being immediately consumed or turned into profit.
Reclaim learning
As something you do for yourself, and not for anyone else.
I'm afraid to tell you, it can actually be quite fun to go down the rabbit hole. Recently, thanks to a wood pigeon couple visiting my garden, I've been learning a lot about pigeons to the point where I started reading academic papers about them.
It's not like that knowledge will be fuelling my career anytime soon, nor does it make me appear like a cool, mystical creature online that'd appeal to the masses.
But it has made the experience of watching these two or three wood pigeons peck around my garden and crash through hedges much more enjoyable because I now have all that context on them. It makes me happy when I see them. It's another small joy to break through the veil of to-dos and latent anxiety of having forgotten an important one.
Of course, pigeons are far from the only theme I've spent countless hours researching without any obvious reward outside of the enjoyment derived from the activity itself.
Curiosity is the gateway to it. It is a way to re-discover childlike wonder and reclaim space away from what's imposed on us from outside. There's no goals, just a desire to understand and find out.
And sometimes, seemingly unrelated topics start to connect, and there's satisfaction in that.
As Josef Pieper asked in Leisure as the basis of culture
"Can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workday existence?"
No, it can't. We're not our job. Our jobs aren't the providers of meaning, nor is the carefully curated image we present of ourselves online. So we shouldn't be governed by them either in what we fill our minds with.
Already in the 1970s, Moritz Schlick reminded us that meaning is in the things that exist for their own sake and carry satisfaction within. There's much joy to be found in free, purposeless exploration.
This is why I say curiosity and a love of learning are dying. Many people would rather be spoon-fed misinformation by a machine than explore new avenues of knowledge. It's not that tech is making us dumber - it's worse. It's killing the desire to even want to learn.
9,677
If we lose our curiosity, what's left?
If we let others dictate what we consume, where, what knowledge we gain, where does it end?
Will we become a society of shallow entertainment, as pictured in Fahrenheit 451? Will we eventually lack the words to describe what we see and, worse, how we feel, turning us into shells of a full human existence?
"There is no need to waste words showing that not everything is useless which cannot be brought under the definition of useful."
Josef Pieper
Thanks for reading 💚
As serendipity will have it, my deep interest in figuring out why life felt shallow and my exploration of philosophy in an attempt to find words to make sense of it have led to me giving a talk at ETH Dublin this weekend titled "Cogs in the Crypto Machine."
If you're around, say hi! If not, I'm sure there will be a recording afterward.
Exploring the complexities of personal branding and education, @naomiii reflects on the pressures of learning skills for immediate utility over genuine curiosity. Emphasizing the importance of pursuing passions, the post encourages a reclaiming of knowledge for the joy of discovery rather than for profit.