Week 7: Reading, College Majors, and the Reality of Humanity

Welcome to my newsletter, where I share weekly wisdom for the artistic to help you discover your inner artist. If you want to check out my essays/long-form writing, feel free to click the link here. Thanks for reading :).

Personal Updates

I had the honor of filming an episode with Tyger (Tyler) Cho, a fellow podcaster (check his own podcast here), writer, and gym streaker (at 900+ now!). In this conversation, we talk about leveraging the power of the Internet, playing infinite-sum games, reading, the power of podcasting, and his leap-of-faith decision to move to South Korea (👋 if you’re reading this :).

Yesterday, I also recorded an episode with Talia Jacqueline, communications expert, TEDx speaker (you can check out the talk here), and CEO of Visceral. In this conversation, we talked about the 3 Ps of communication, communicating from the heart, living up to your values, the courage to do the inner work, Talia's story, and much more.

Learnings

1: Learn to Love to Read (Naval)

The world is filled with a deluge of information. With infinite news articles, tweets, and videos pumped out every second, it’s hard to not feel as if you are suffocating. In this day and age, randomly consuming information isn’t enough to become a well-informed, knowledgeable citizen of society. You must curate an information diet, one that is nutritious and healthy.

Imagine the mouth of the Mississippi River flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. That’s where most people consume information, the repeater. They try to learn a thing or two, but the amount of water flowing is way too great. Instead, imagine you travel upstream, to one of the branches where the river begins. That’s the source, where knowledge is richest and closest to the frontier.

Great books are the source of knowledge. In fact, if you read 2-3 books on a particular subject, you’ll be 85% more knowledgeable than the general population (from Tim Ferriss). The greatest thinkers are foundationalist truth seekers. They seek the basis of where truth and wisdom begin. Maybe it’s time to prop up the Bible or The Iliad again…

2: STEM vs. Humanities Majors

I recently came across this tweet:

I’m noticing an interesting trend here: many STEM graduates who do really well in their careers end up finding themselves in a mid-life crisis where they begin questioning their own existentialism. Many of them take sabbaticals or quit their jobs altogether, to get into fields such as spirituality, coaching, consulting, or other forms of creative work.

Meanwhile, those who excel in the arts when they’re young (aka me) find themselves at a careers crossroads where they make the decision to either double down on their art or push it off to the side to first become financially independent - which usually involves some sort of work in STEM. The latter is more common, and I notice many people who have done this.

The unfortunate reality is that college has gotten so expensive nowadays that it makes zero financial sense to major in a negative-ROI subject aka the humanities. All the financial upside goes to STEM majors. Unless you’re in a position where you’re taking college as a purely educational game, then it’s totally cool to study whatever major you want that best interests you.

However, humanities majors are up a lot of pressure right now. Not only has much of its academia become “wokified” and financially unsustainable, you genuinely don’t need to go to college today to study the humanities. All the value of college goes to the specific skills that actually require special supervision, equipment, and funding (e.g: scientific research, medicine, etc).

3: What The Atheists Get Wrong About the Bible

In my great attempt to disprove Christianity, I came across a head-hurting video by Jonathan Pageau, one of the great Christian thinkers I look up to and his whole view on this concept called the symbolic world. Essentially, his main premise is that the world operates on symbolic patterns and connections. Let me explain it to you more concretely:

Look around you. There are SO many things around you. If I asked you to walk around and name everything you see, that’d be impossible. There is no limit to the amount of description you can give something. But here’s the question of the day: In a world of infinite things to see and describe, why can we still perceive order from chaos? Here’s what Pageau has to say:

He goes on to explain that the world operates on the concepts of unity and multiplicity. Pageau argues that identities came before the time of humans. “Once they’re given to us,” he says, “then we can analyze them.” For example, we can scientifically study elephants. But science is secondary, a form of abstraction from our experience with reality. He further elaborates:

So how does this all translate to Christianity? I’m still not sure, but you know all the great scientific arguments trying to prove theism? You know, the Kalam Cosmological or Fine-Tuning arguments? Essentially, if what Pageau is saying is right, then all the scientific arguments for theism are essentially a waste since science is simply proving what is given.

We’re given mountains. We’re given trees. We’re given the intricacies of the human body. We’re given dirt. We’re given birds. We can study them and manipulate them around, but the reality we are in is the reality we are in. Okay, my brain hurts. I’m going to end it here LMAO.

Conclusion

I’m having an absolute blast writing these weekly newsletters. I’m totally ranting and doing zero editing (apologies if you find any grammatical or spelling errors), but it’s fun spilling my consciousness out. Let me know if you enjoy these write-ups. And of course, here’s a quote to finish off this week’s post, from none other than Haruki Murakami:

Stay curious,

Jeston