The Age of Understanding…
Everyone has heard of the ‘information age’. The signs surround us and are unmistakable. There is much information available to you today.
The reality is that information alone is not enough. Regardless of what you are trying to learn there is always some expenditure of time and effort necessary to reach the point of understanding.
Information is useless without understanding. You can take good information, mix it up, get it confused and have disastrous results when you attempt to utilize it. Without putting in the effort and time to make sense of information and reach a workable ‘understanding’, there is little chance of all that information actually becoming ‘useful’ to you.
Understanding takes a time.
You read from multiple sources, digest information, have practical experiences then then you begin to understand. It is great to have information at your finger tips. However, the whole point is to utilize the information to make your life better in some way, shape or form. For this, you must have ‘understanding’.
This is the problem. Understanding any topic or subject, from the complex and vast topics such as astrophysics right down to much simpler tasks such as changing the oil in your car – all take varying degrees of time, effort and possibly practical experience to reach that point called: understanding. Most of the time, some form of practical experience is necessary to reach a workable level of understanding as well.
Aside from the time it takes to reach the point of understanding – there is always more to learn, more information and knowledge to synthesize in your own mind and this will lead you to new and hopefully deeper understandings. In other words, you may need to deepen your knowledge and this takes more time, effort and possibly practical experience!
The information age is only a small stepping stone. Understanding is what we are all really after. You can buy information or possibly find it for free from a variety of sources, but if you never begin to delve into that information (a process that takes time and effort) – then the information remains useless to you.
Time
I do not know how you perceive life currently but one of the big problems for me is time. I feel like the day is over even though it seems as if it had just begun a few minutes ago. With time moving so fast, your ability to reach an understanding on any given topic requires a greater percentage of that most precious asset, time!
In addition, you, just like most people, probably have multiple topics, subjects and concepts to learn. With the shortage of time, how in the world is this possible?
Therefore you are forced to make a special form of compromise called prioritization. With this compromise you have to actually decide what you are going to learn. The reason why: you don’t have time to learn it all.
You are forced into greater degrees of prioritization until your life becomes more work than anything else. The topics that you are interested in you may not have time for in your daily rush to ‘get things done’.
If all you had to deal with were simple tasks that you had to get out of the way before you could get to the things you want to learn and do, that would be an almost simple matter and a fortunate situation to be in!
However, consider that there are things you are forced to develop an understanding about (again this takes time and effort) and this can put you in a position where you cannot get everything done that you must.
As you can see this is a vicious loop to be in. Only those with significant leisure time have the opportunity to pursue things they are most interested in. If you are fortunate enough to find work that you love, that would be an ideal solution.
On the other hand, if you have all the leisure time and money resources in the world, then you are truly blessed because your burden of time and effort becomes so much less than most of the people in the world stuck in what has been called, ‘the rat race’.
Everyone sees this problem, and many begin to focus on achieving the point of having abundant time and resources. This begins a new learning curve. This takes – you guessed it – time and effort. And since the answers are not often simple, you could find yourself quickly getting lost in a sea of, you guessed it again, ‘information’!
We need to move out of the age of information and into the age of understanding – I have no idea on how we can do that. But you can leave your comments, ideas, thoughts and criticisms below with a comment.
Author: David writes for All Things Pondered sometimes. He is also the author of the book: What You Should Know about Gum Disease – available at most online booksellers. It is 278 pages of dental health goodness designed to save you time, money and most of all – pain!
February 4th, 2010 at 9:25 pm
I completely understand. There are not enough hours in the day but the key is definitely prioritizing. A site has an interesting take on the perception of time when it comes to movies and air travel.
I think overall we need to decide to be a generalist or specialist. Do everything or one thing really well. By doing one thing really well, you’ll make enough money to pay for everything else. At least I hope so.
.-= John Smith´s last blog ..American Violet, Society, and Second Chances =-.
February 10th, 2010 at 2:15 am
The thing about time is that once you start running out of it, you never get it back. You might get ahead in certain areas of life, but you’re always behind somewhere. Prioritizing helps manage daily life, but it can’t solve all of our problems. In the end, you just have to pick your battles and try to forget about what you must leave behind. It’s just a sad reality of modern society.
.-= Heaven´s last blog ..Who from Big Brother listens in to cell phone calls? =-.
February 15th, 2010 at 1:52 am
There is a qoute that i am sure that most of us have heard in passing and it goes like this, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” The meaning of that statement is to “seek understanding,” when it comes to the things that are important and vital to your well-being. They can be to “seek to understand yourself more fully,” or in your intimate relationship with your one and only, or it can be in what you feel and have a passion for every single day of your life, whether it be your purpose in why you were put in this planet to “Love & Selflessly Serve Humanity wholeheartedly.” The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing, and that is to “Seek understanding,” in all that we say and do!!!
.-= Kaleo´s last blog ..There are two very VERY different ways of understanding Hawaii…. =-.
March 31st, 2010 at 3:54 pm
You made the initial point and i’ll follow through, information is data processed and made more accessible, information truly becomes valuable when its synthesised into knowledge.