Ever since I left college I felt a huge lack of structure in how I was learning. It was chaotic at worst and a mess at best. There is just so much stuff to learn, all the time, for no reason. I see an article on social ecology, that sounds interesting! Why are Chinese drivers killing people that they hit? I need to find out! My web browser has over 1000 browser bookmarks. I've got around 250 saved links on Facebook and a few tumblr blogs just for archiving. Initially, I thought that I would set aside a day to just cut down on all the links, like clearing my e-mail inbox. Obviously, that didn't happen.
As the number of links, folders, and blogs I was keeping track of went from the dozens into the hundreds, I noticed I was spending more time gathering information than I was processing it. Once I did find something that was relevant to my daily life and conversations, I didn't even need to rework it. I could just regurgitate it if the topic ever came up on Facebook or in forum threads. Why would I need to learn about something verbatim when I can just link to it? Why should I prepare an essay when social media platforms like Twitter and tumblr make it nigh impossible to do a lengthy analysis of anything?
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I think the internet and the information age in general has been invaluable, truly. I think access to information should be even easier. I just don't know how to personally manage it. It's not just an internet issue for me; there are dozens of books in my bedroom gathering dust. I keep old textbooks, paper copies of news articles, magazines...
Somewhere between the lack of focus, the clutter, and the feeling that I was just a voice box for talking points, I took up writing again. I had written for my college newspaper but it was by and large devil's advocate and current event pieces. The more I wrote, the more I wondered why I had stopped in the first place.
I spent less time looking for useless information and what I did have, I started judging. "Can I use this? Would someone read this?" Writing gradually let me trim down what was considered relevant and helped me form a cohesive narrative on my political positions instead of just various trains of thought. Building off of my notes meant I could get rid of more of the physical copies of my sources, so the mess of papers in my closet is gradually cutting down, too.
Quite often I have weeks I don't even know where to start writing, so the trains of thought do come in handy sometimes. Dozens of articles over the past year that I've started and scrapped, a few of them for Odyssey. There are so many articles that I find quirky but they simply don't amount to anything. That's okay, though! It took me years to build up this jumbled scrap pile of information; it will take years to clean up.
