“Never stop learning; for when we stop learning, we stop growing.”
-Loyal Jack Lewman 

Look we’ve all heard and made excuses like, ‘....but I’ve got a presentation due’, ‘no time today because I’ve to clean the house’, ‘there’s this meeting I’ve to attend’, ‘I’ve got to complete this game today’, ‘going to pick out clothes for the party’, and ‘I haven’t the time between taking care of you and your father/mother’. 

And believe us, these feel like all legitimate, valid reasons to skip on a day of learning something, anything, new. In fact if you analyse closely, our typical understanding of ‘learning’ comes from our experience as little children. 

Children who were made to suffer through unending and arduous chapters, weekly tests and grades. To make it worse, there’s an absolute dissonance between some of the things we were made to learn as children and the practical application of those things in the adult world. 

To top it all off, the modern world does not leave any room for respite. Sure, the pandemic functioned as an ‘Emergency Stop’ button and we promised ourselves to be something better, something bolder, something new but ask yourself....did it really change anything? 120 days later and we’re still dragging an entire company’s workload on our shoulders. Although, this time around, your boss and your coworkers are in your home, next to your bed or breakfast table, most likely 24X7. 

For the parents of this world, your toddlers or teenagers are also stuck at home. Those 5-6 hours of relief, whether at a school or college, are also a thing of the past, at least in the present. The parents are also devoid of any peace or respite because all the toys are on the floor (now everyday since pandemic) and the 19- year-old just won’t stop blasting music at 1 in the morning. We may have tried to pick up a new creative hobby but tell ourselves that for the reasons above, these hobbies, which have an obvious learning curve, are just not worth our time and energy. Hell, reading a ticker news item seems like a stretch.

BUT 

Please, as the quote suggests, do not stop learning. Try to process every bit of information that comes to you and not dismiss it actively. We suggest that we take a step further and add sources to our daily lives which can help us learn something new everyday. We can start by adding to our lexicon (meaning; vocabulary of a person), or learning a new language. Start entirely from scratch, one word at a time, as per commodité (the French word for convenience), and then move to reading a piece of literature, even if it is one page at a time. 

Other avenues that can be explored include Podcasts and Audiobooks. And if these seem overwhelming, there is always YouTube. There are tons of creators and authors on these platforms, ready to teach us something useful that might help us navigate this ever changing world. 

Now, the above sources can be considered as objective ways of learning. Tangible mediums that serve a source of knowledge. The other way is more subjective in its approach and perhaps more difficult of the two. It also depends on factors such as age, social class, race, gender and one’s political inclination. And look, we won’t talk about all of these things now because they require a separate blog. Rather, we’ll pick a more immediate avenue of subjective learning.

Dear adults, millennials are not trying to ‘one-up’ you. Far from it. Most of us are exhausted of trying to make our mark in an ever competitive capitalistic world to try and ‘win’ arguments. We genuinely believe in the Dutch proverb, “live and let live” from 1622 (another piece of information for you, cheers!). Our grief, our discoveries, our ideals, our ideas, our empathies and sympathies may seem trivial, but understand that they come from a place of knowledge, knowledge that you set us out for to gain and a knowledge of ourselves, our relationship with the outside world, and the knowledge that we want to share with you. 

Rather, think of it as an opportunity to learn something new about the world that you were once a part of or as a way to discover something new about your child, sibling, wife, husband, literally anybody. And parents, you are allowed to have a life beyond your children. 

There are things you may have wanted to do and maybe you hit pause on something you wanted to learn, but as the saying goes, “there is no age limit to learning”, and well, maybe it is time to act on some of these sayings.

For generation Y and Z, we’re a lot smarter than we were yesterday. But it is an ongoing process and to maintain it, we need to re-learn everything about anything we were aware of even an hour ago. Sounds confusing? It is. 

So re-read it. Pick every sentence apart, analyse each word, keep asking the same question till your curiosity is satisfied, but do it because once you learn how to do it - it will positively affect your epistemological (tiny exercise; look this word up) extent. 



You can find some good sources of learning something new below - 
https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day 
https://stories.audible.com/start-listen 
https://play.acast.com/s/philosophyforourtimes 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize 
https://medium.com/@mary_agbesanwa 
https://hackaday.com 
https://www.surfacelanguages.com