Feeling The Need To Be Smart

I have recently felt the need to be "smarter" but have not really thought about what this means, not in any depth at any rate. What am I feeling when I feel myself getting "dumber"? How do I know I am getting dumber? What is the evidence for this assertion?

Instead of ruminating, I can embark on a programme of sharpening my mind. But again, I come to the same question. I am simply restating that I feel the need to grow smarter. So I need to think about the why, the how, the when, the where, the ins and outs...

Currently, my life is a bit vacuous, but that will soon change. I will be in a job that puts me at the centre of everything. Markets I feel are am excellent means of understanding the world. To invest well one must have an inkling as to the future. To have an inkling into the future one must understand the present and the past, one must be able to abstract systems and trends, one must think about oneself critically and challenge one's own views.

My feeling of not being smart is brought on by a number of unhealthy habits. The obvious is perhaps the mindless, useless consumption of media. Media which implants thought in my head, thought which flows in and out without leaving much of an impact, giving me the illusion of understanding or saving me from the discomfort of dealing with my own thoughts (or lack thereof).

But a less obvious habit may be the self criticism itself. It is good to look at oneself from a critical lens. But the feeling of not being smart emanates from somewhere. Going back to the point on evidence, I think the feeling stems from countless instances, taken as empirical data points subconsciously, that aggregate and allow the feeling "I am not smart" to emerge. Therein lies the bad habit.

The bad habit is to let these thoughts accumulate. For example, as I write my novel, I am presented with the feeling "I am such a bad writer. My thoughts are shallow, my dialogue flat, the characters are boring, etc." But rather than deal with this feeling, and deal with the feeling of "This is a problem, I am unsure how to solve it, I am unsure if I am capable of solving it.", I let it fester.

So then being smart really means being able to solve the myriad problems I am presented with. Or perhaps being smart is simply being able to overcome the discomfort of problem solving, whether it is creative writing, financial decision-making, interacting with others, and so forth. That is smart.

How then do I bring it all together? What does all this mean for me as I go forward? The answers aren't clear - and that is part of the point I was making. To get into specifics, writing will involve thinking, lots and lots of thinking, and reading novels and "how to", and meeting others and sharing and contributing. Markets involve pretty much the same thing.

But there's something else too. There is value in learning for the sake of learning, in learning openly and without a specific object in mind.

So then we come to the questions of what to learn, and how. And here I meet that feeling I thought of above. A niggling discomfort that blossoms into an uneasy self doubt. What should I learn? Philosophy? History? A guide to writing? Economics? Statistics? Mathematics? Everything! And how? I need to discuss what I read, I need to ascertain that I understand what I read. Reddit? Discord? But am I not going down the same rabbit hole if I do that? God, I wish I were smarter, I hear myself think. Maybe ask an AI. Answers! Delivered in seconds!

Only I have enough contextual information about my life, my aspirations, to figure out what it is I want to explore. And really there's only one way to learn, and it's uncomfortable. I have to read. That's where it all starts. Read, think, discuss, teach... But it all starts with reading.

Now, where do I begin?