I tell people I am a Wikipedia genius, I read about something then I am genius for about 15 minutes on that topic til it fades.

There is a vast difference between “downloading” and “knowing”. We must strive to know, but not to possess.

The more knowledge we acquire the smaller our brains get in proportion. So we long passed the point of knowing everything. But there are many forms of knowledge.

Look at it this way. The the earth is only 24,000 miles round aprox, so you could walk round it in a couple of years, or at least do the equivalent, since there is no continual land mass, so you could quite easily do the mileage many times in one lifetime.

But, because of the square law, the land area of the earth is about fifty five to sixty million square miles, which means that if you wanted to walk though the centre of EVERY SQUARE MILE, doing just a single one mile length, and thus view every square mile at first hand. It would take you five thousand years. Quite impossible. And at that you would only have walked through the centre of each one, which means that you could not say that you knew it well, there would be whole masses of stuff down side streets ( a million bars you may never have a drink in ) in hollows on the moors, ( billions of flowers you would not see at that speed ), or hidden in woods, creatures living out their whole lives, you would never have seen. While it is said that in every spadeful of earth you care to dig up, you could in theory, ( its a bit complicated ) with care, find three new species.

And that is just the surface of this tiny planet, which is only one millionth the size of its sun and only the fifth largest planet in the solar system.

The realms for even physical exploring therefore, are just vast beyond imagining. Yet is not that exciting, rather than depressing, because it means that not only could we never come to the end of our personal learning, and the joy of finding new things, the challenge is just too vast. But also that, we need never come to the end of finding things which no one else has ever known or appreciated, or will do again. Go out into a wild meadow and find a flower, note where it is, what it does, if it has strange marks on any leaves, or find a wild mouse in the woods and watch what it does of five mins, or sit in a bar one night and list the names of all the people there, uniquely on that one night. None of those things will happen again, and a year later perhaps, maybe less, things will have changed so they never could happen again. Which means that each of those experiences is unique to you, an piece of knowledge nobody else will ever have, and that you have given appreciation to some wonder of life, that without you, would never have been appreciated or known by anyone.

I think that makes ordinary life a wonderful chance to be special.

And think perhaps on this, the other day you made a post in which you said you were lost to hope. Well this is a very long post, perhaps too long you would say. But consider that, you now live in a world where a stranger on the other side of the world, who you will probably never meet, thinks it worth the trouble to answer you with a long hard thought through post. ( Not trying to brag here, would not want to brag about being a bore anyway. .) Just pointing out the strangeness of it.