In short, the indirectness of animal existence holds in its wakefulness the twin possibilities of enjoyment and suffering, both wedded to effort. The two evolve together, and the liability of suffering is not a shortcoming which detracts from the faculty of enjoyment, but its necessary complement.

What must survive a student’s higher education today is a facility for life-long learning. Consider how steep the learning curve has become in the professional workplace. Knowledge has become so ephemeral that management experts have tried to get a handle on the educational challenge by using a yardstick they call the “half-life of knowledge.” This is the amount of time it takes for half of one’s professional knowledge to become obsolete. I’ve seen estimates that, overall, the half-life of knowledge is somewhere between four and seven years. For technical fields, it is much less; half of what software developers know now, for example, will likely be irrelevant in just 18 months.9 As Maryanne Rouse has written, “We used to think of the long run as ten to fifteen years; in many technology-dependent industries the long run may now be six months or less. And while the pace of knowledge-creation is accelerating, the half-life of knowledge becomes shorter each year. What this means for us is that concepts are far more important than facts and the ability to analyze and synthesize has much greater value than the ability to memorize. In short, school may be multiple choice but real life is all essay.”
In real life, then, the skills of synthesis and systemic thinking are not just luxuries, they are invaluable. We are, after all, living through an Information Revolution, which parallels the Industrial Revolution in its impact and far-reaching consequences. Information—of all varieties, all levels of priority and all without much context—is bombarding us from all directions all the time.

For we never, for example, become mathematicians by remembering all the demonstrations of others unless we are also capable of solving any kind of problem that may be proposed, nor do we become philosophers by reading all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, for if we cannot ourselves reach a firm judgment concerning whatever it at issue, it would appear that we are not devoting ourselves to science, but to history.

What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology! — I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.