Nitpicking Life and Learning

01 Dec, 2024

I’ve been trying for a while to get to the bottom of what bothers me about the phrase “lifelong learning.” Where’s the harm—what could be anything but good—in encouraging people to feed their curiosity and increase their knowledge about some or many aspects of the world, themselves, etc.? After all, I’m one of those inveterate nerds who should be ecstatic about the possibilities all this celebration offers. And yet... the phrase never exits my mouth wrapped in anything but scorn.

My sense is that it’s the way people talk about what should boil down to an active interest in the world, as well as what they really mean when they refer to it. Take as representative the manner in which one school of professional studies hypes the phenomenon—first by feeling the need to define and refine what it means to engage in lifelong learning. Although there’s some sort of professed acceptance on this page that you could pursue your interests in as informal a fashion as desired, when we’re told that “it’s worthwhile to pursue more knowledge and skills with each passing year,” I don’t see anything like walking around a meadow on a perfect day, guide to flora and fauna in hand and just strolling where you will, lying down in the grass, watching the ants and bees and butterflies for a while, and then reading a book, counting for a damn thing. Among the many terms we could argue about in that quotation, it might come down to what we think “worthwhile” entails.¹

If your aim is to get ahead, get a promotion, get a new job, or get in with the in crowd, the right skills are definitely worthwhile. Thanks to your learning, you might indeed be “empowered,” as this site and so many others claim, to do any number of things (although those particular things are rarely delineated, leaving that empowerment to glory in its impressive generality). And undoubtedly, there’s a good bit of truth to the old assertion that “knowledge is power”: literacy and numeracy will undeniably improve your life—helping you avoid, say, bad players who assure you there’s nothing more than formalities in a document they want you to sign, or hold up a ledger of nonsense transactions to prove their trustworthiness. Mastering the language of a country in which you’ve suddenly found yourself exiled will surely provide you with the ability to survive, maybe even thrive, allowing you to form relationships and involve yourself fully in your new home instead of sitting on the sidelines.

But in building its argument, the website’s phrasing clues us in to what sort of things it’s worthwhile to pursue: in “acquiring skills,” you’re “taking ownership of your future” by cultivating a “growth mindset” so that you can “celebrate[e] success” thanks to your “marketable skills and interests.” It all starts to make you suspect that unless it leads somewhere you can cash in on your investment (you’ve acquired it, after all), none of this learning will have been worthwhile.

Fine; if that’s what it takes to get us thinking, shouldn’t we embrace it? Well, maybe; if any of that thinking helped learners to see all their skills acquisition wasn’t doing much more than solidifying their position in a stupid roundabout where they keep upping their empowerment with new corporate phrases and efficiency hacks while workplaces keep downsizing and cutting benefits and casting off anyone who’s been there too long. If it all helped learners to value an experience as an experience they enjoyed, instead of having to monetize it or fit it into some means-ends system in which everything is fitted out with an identifiably practical, self-improving outcome.

I’m not going to pooh-pooh becoming fluent in web design. But here’s another way to think about what this universe of learning is and isn’t. In describing gift economies, Lewis Hyde made a clear distinction between value and worth:

a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth…. I mean "worth" to refer to those things we prize and yet say "you can’t put a price on it." We derive value, on the other hand, from the comparison of one thing with another…. The phrases "exchange value" and "market value" carry the sense of "value" I mean to mark here: a thing has no market value in itself except when it is in the marketplace, and what cannot be exchanged has no exchange value.²

What if getting pretty good at macramé, and finding sheer joy in making all those knots, doesn’t get you a promotion, lead to a side gig on eBay, or even make finding presents for people a snap, since not even your mom wants your twiny basket holders or wall hangings? Will your time have been wasted? Will it all have been worthless? A week after having lolled in the meadow and identified a flower thanks to your handy guide, you forget the poor flower’s name: what’s left of your learning experience? How justify it?

I get the sense I’m simultaneously blowing things out of proportion and not being clear enough about what’s bothering me. In general, in wrapping itself in the language and spirit of corporate pieties, the way lifelong learning is sold to us—“sold” being a key here—is telling us all that learning is really just supposed to give us the ability (skills!) to keep ourselves sane within a system where certain identifiable, objectively obtainable qualities and capacities are valued. What it’s not meant to do is get us to start thinking about how we could change in any meaningful way the structures that keep the world (and ourselves) unfair and stupid and something other than happy—not even to see those structures as changeable or as anything other than the way things are and always have been. Imagine an edgy school of professional development letting, say, anthropologist Michael Taussig teach anything at all. There you are, thinking you’ll be able to spout something original at the next networking social about your greater knowledge of South American peasant culture, and you’re hit with the demand to consider the fact that

all cultures tend to present [their] categories as if they were not social products but elemental and immutable things. As soon as such categories are defined as natural, rather than as social, products, epistemology itself acts to conceal understanding of the social order. Our experience, our understanding, our explanations—all serve merely to ratify the conventions that sustain our sense of reality unless we appreciate the extent to which the basic "building blocks" of our experience and our sensed reality are not natural but social constructions.³

Shit. That won’t land well in the team huddle. Suggest that productivity is just a social construction, and you’ll probably have to go construct your financial reality elsewhere. Definitely not worthwhile.

There’s no answer here, no solution. I don’t want to deny the fact that “learning” is and can be very concretely useful; we have to learn to tie our shoes, keep a budget, and have conversations with other people. Developing skills and understanding the world are good things. But bringing it all under the umbrella of a commodified universe and the inane ways it talks feels pretty rotten. It feels like one of the best gifts you could experience—wonder at witnessing a process unfold, the thrill of finally understanding what the hell a logarithm is and what it does, being able to fix your own busted sink pipe—has to be justified to the gods of professionalism, categorized and stamped and displayed with a digital badge. It feels like maybe one of the best things to learn is how to learn anything at all without the marketers knowing a thing about it.

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