How often do you shake your head when eavesdropping on “experts,” spouting off and effectively berating the ears of those they are holding captive? They move through a tirade, espousing profound insights that are so obviously correct to themselves that they are indignant that there should be any other viewpoint.

Sometimes, they confront someone they’ve joined for a meal, and as we sit there awaiting our food, they put on display for the tables within earshot their intolerance, bias, and general lack of knowledge regarding the nuances that are integral to reality. Their one-size-fits-all ideas of solutions are short-sighted and indicative of someone living in an ancient pre-history bubble.

If you want to meet the nicest people in society, look for those who know how to listen and seem genuinely interested in what others have to say. The person who listens is processing what you are saying and trying to find a sympathetic complimentary conversation that will engage you, and if they are well-read, they will know when to offer a challenging opinion else they’ve hopefully learned to play it safe and recognize that there is no having a discussion with you as they continue to nod politely.

When our opinions and knowledge are malleable, we are allowing ourselves to benefit from social interactions where we can encounter the graciousness of civility from others interested in sharing. On the other hand, when we surround ourselves with an echo chamber of voices that reinforce our biases, we are trying to ensure that our cocoon remains an insulating bulwark against the marauding terror of those who “Don’t know the real truth.”

Also, in this category of public display of stupidity is loud gossip. While gossip is an essential part of the social bonding that must take place and has likely been integral to our ability to live in large groups, in days past, it was done relatively privately as it dealt with rumors and was on occasion hostile towards the person or persons it was about. Today, it is done in the open. It is not uncommon to hear employees talking about other staff in derogatory terms or people talking about their relatives or even spouses in less than flattering ways.

Is this all because we started living outside in public? Did our phones becoming mobile move idle chatter into earshot of everyone else? And now, because we assumed no one was listening to our “private” calls, we can have “private” face-to-face conversations where nobody is listening? Or am I simply being rude by eavesdropping on what should be private in public?

My sadomasochistic existence, as I’ve come to describe it, is not defined through the filter you might be thinking of. This is not 50 shades of John, but it is 50 shades of struggle.

Let me get this out of the way: I love difficulty, while I simultaneously hate difficulty. My ability to adapt to my interests can be a challenge. I want to explore all things complex, obtuse, opaque, and seemingly impossible for my mind of limited bandwidth to handle.

I wanted to know about critical thinking and reason, so I looked to Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, Nietzsche, and others who all tried to hurt my brain with their musings. I went on to learn about actor-network theory, so I picked up a book from Bruno Latour to help me learn the extent of my own comprehension deficits. Want to learn about infinity? Try David Deutsch, but check your confidence at the door (inside joke). Wow, making music might be interesting, so why not collect 150 synthesizer modules and figure out how they communicate before you can begin making primitive car alarm sounds? Go on vacation? Sure, if it’s at the bottom of the Grand Canyon where I might begin to understand the Great Unconformity, cratons, and rock morphology spread out across two billion years.

Ask my wife about my caveman grammar, and she’ll assure you that I’m an idiot when it comes to punctuation. Without her, everything I wrote above would be in a single run-on sentence with commas everywhere you wouldn’t expect them. Writing isn’t easy, but the words flow through my head, and have to find somewhere to live otherwise, they’d keep falling into people’s ears who couldn’t care less. While I know the eye rolls are signaling that I should stop, my compulsion to keep on talking wins the day for me.

I need a tutor or blue pill that will help me understand the bigger ideas behind deep learning while someone else teaches me soldering. Of course, I looked into soldering classes, but they cost thousands. A tensor-enabled deep-learning workstation starts at around $10k. Then you need time and space to allow these new hobbies to become part of a routine that already involves art, music, writing, travel, cooking, reading, and a wife that I share these things with.

Maybe you are thinking, “Why don’t you start small and solder something simple or explore artificial intelligence on a slower system?” Well, Ben Franklin is quoted as saying, “Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.” I’m 55 years old and keenly aware of my limited time left on earth and while it may be pessimistic to acknowledge that fact, it does figure into how thin I can spread my attention. My curiosity, though, doesn’t know those bounds, and so I dream of what great new discoveries I’ll be making about myself and life in the future.

So, while my pain of desire to do all things of interest to me will remain a thorn in my side, the enthusiasm to continue on a path of discovery is profoundly satisfying, even when not truly satisfied with accomplishment.

Gradations of madness, low intelligence, and plain stupidity are the unfortunate outcomes of forty years of stoking the fires of mediocrity here in America. Instead of forming the foundation of strength found in strong education, our country, for reasons unbeknownst to me, has gleefully accepted banality over the extraordinary.

Scholars and people of privilege isolated from the masses would likely disagree with my assessment, as would the typical person unaware of their own potential or lack thereof, but who among us is listening? Who goes out to explore the various socioeconomic corners of our country? I have, and I listen. From the television to the coffee shop and from the airplane to the national park I have watched and been witness to the conversation and behaviors of those around me.

Call me delusional, but I yearn for the general population to ascend to a higher degree of curiosity, verbal acuity, and discernment. “Why do you care?” is how this concern is most often met by others. Why can’t I just accept people for who they are is something I’ve been asked countless times. My answer hovers around the fear coursing through my mind that these aberrations are, to some degree, a part of what is normalized in our society.

If the common person accepts that they needn’t continuously improve and add to their knowledge over the course of their lives, they set a poor example to others in their communities and their families. Without striving for betterment, they merely exist, except they often don’t do so silently. Many will lament what they sense they are being denied and that others are somehow gaining easy access to the things, wealth, and experiences they themselves desire.

Is my knowledge or perception that of someone on a pedestal, and is my concern an exercise in futility? I suppose I should answer both with a yes, as the person who believes I’m talking down at them would see me as arrogant, trying to place myself above others. For the second half of the question, I see the likes of Noam Chomsky atop his bully pulpit and must accept that I will never have the audience reach he has achieved. Even if I were to gain greater readership, it would probably be for naught, though, since I fail to see a large impact from Chomsky and other intellectuals who have been able to push back on the crush of idiocy charging forward.

To contradict my answer in the previous paragraph, I have to offer up a qualified no as my true answer. I come from a blue-collar family, dropped out of high school, and was an enlisted soldier in the military. If I’m on a pedestal, it wasn’t conveyed to me by formal education or privilege in society. I know what my demands are of myself and would hope that my fellow citizens were able to strive for at least my humble station in life. As for the exercise in futility, while I don’t have thousands or millions of readers, I do feel that if even one other person were to glean something of benefit from my musings, then I have contributed a thing of value. I’ve known of people who’ve taken other’s lives and seen their suffering with shame; I, on the other hand, will never have to face shame for wishing others to do better than myself.

Polarization, using categorization that amounts to name-calling or as a bludgeoning affront to someone’s intelligence, has become our preferred and maybe most sophisticated current means of engaging in a dialectic.

Just that one sentence is longer than your average tweet and exceeds 85% of the U.S. population’s ability to decipher it.

From our political leadership to many in the popular media, we are pandering to our worst tendencies and apparently have given up on trying to elevate our society. While we ask for increased skills, we are failing to nurture a dialog beyond the utterly inane.

Take this old tweet from our president: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

This missive can be understood by the majority of those considered functionally illiterate as their reading comprehension level is that of a 4^th grader, while my first sentence required 19 years of education (according to various readability tests). This is not an exercise in writing obtusely for the sake of lording my version of complexity over anyone. The larger point is that if you are over 30 years old and are relating to the words of 10-year-olds and cannot comprehend the words of a 55-year-old high school dropout, then maybe the problem is not your perception of me being obtuse or arrogant but that you have neglected the responsibility to yourself.

Why should I feel so alone in my knowledge? Is it a fringe belief system that hinges on delusions and conspiracy theories? No, while I find some of those entertaining, they are mere fodder for distraction that needs to remain where they emerged from: on the fringe.

On the contrary, I’m in love with history, philosophy, and sociology, the glue of culture. From out of the sciences we learn of the building blocks of the very nature of the universe to the emergent organic beings we are.

Meshed together, we form a society that is disparate and grossly unequal. Our shared existence is fracturing as we seem intent on stratifying those who might vaguely understand things from those who are oblivious though self-righteousness while they falsely believe they are the true holders of knowledge.

Those who claim the power of knowledge but are relying on politics to sway a corruptible underclass into becoming their mob are betraying the very values that are supposed to be indicative of their intellect: professional education and proclaimed religious affiliation.

We are not lifting up the masses; we are merely making their poverty comfortable. Poverty is not only about the goods or capital one possesses or fails to attain, but it is also about the intellectual tools that help form decision-making rigor, which leads to better life choices.

I cannot claim to have a professional university education; I dropped out of high school. I cannot be certain that drug use hasn’t fogged my perception. So, what knowledge I might have can easily be dismissed as a perfunctory superficial education that was acquired willy-nilly. All the same, I have to scratch my head in disbelief at what we, as a citizenry allow to pass as being credible from our leadership and even from one another.

Basic logic is lost in hyperbole and an attention span dictated by threes. Some thirty years ago, my idea was as follows: large issues could remain in the public’s mind for upwards of three months, such as political issues, serial killers, and freedom movements such as apartheid. The next block was three-day attention, and it pertained to movies, sports, and larger local issues. Finally, there was the three-hour attention that might see people talking about a TV show, a celebrity drama, or a local sporting event at the high school.

Today, I have to revise this to three hours, three minutes, and three seconds. While it could be argued that a relatively recent event, such as the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, spent more than three hours in the news cycle, I’m suggesting that the majority of people didn’t spend even three hours in consideration of or contemplating the impact of the process that was unfolding. On the contrary, I’d suggest that the average person only needed three seconds to make up their mind. There doesn’t seem to be much of anything that can raise the ire of a person enough to get them engaged for more than about a few minutes.

There’s an inherent problem here in that none of us will ever know anything of any value if we can only ever afford three seconds of decision-making after three minutes of information gathering. We cannot learn languages in three minutes, three hours, three days, or even three weeks. To that end, we are collectively being manipulated by broadcast and social media-driven political establishments that are able to distract the uneducated with a superfluous dusting of titillating fragments that delude their adherents into believing they are well-informed.

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, Marshall McLuhan in The Medium is the Message, and Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death all foresaw the dangers of our passivity but were powerless to curb a population bent on self-destruction and having already turned away from the written word. Now, amplify their prognostications by taking the internet and reducing the dialog to six-second videos found in what became known as vines and speech that is reduced to a tweet, and the recipe for stupefaction is well in place.

Let’s return to my opening statement: why do I feel so alone in my knowledge? At any given moment in my day, I cannot be surrounded by people who care or are able to consider ideas that their intransigence isn’t able to engage. Their memes, which have become their mentors, fit nicely for a minute or two and only work to reinforce their sense of certainty that plays to their continued ignorance, masquerading as a kind of knowledge but one without depth.

I don’t necessarily see a refuge where I can turn to be in a community that cherishes or at least respects the age of knowledge that is quickly fading if it’s not already dead. Populism easily escalates into nationalism, and this is especially so when able to lob these idiocies on a disenfranchised, poorly educated populace, which is exactly what we’ve cultivated for the past 40 years.

Maybe the better question for myself should be, why have I been cursed with this sense of awareness that impinges on my well-being?

What are you doing to cultivate your potential? How often do you practice literacy? When was the last time you tried something that wasn’t necessarily physically demanding but had you questioning if your mind was up to the task?

Every day, I ask myself why it appears that so many are comfortable in lazy banalities. What’s wrong with digging into our minds whose currency and lifeblood are words? Our imaginations have become muscles atrophied through the neglect brought by existential angst. Don’t worry about those things outside yourself; dig into the things within that are vast landscapes awaiting your exploration.

Where do you begin such an enormous task? Maybe right there on your smartphone. Go ahead and ask it to tell you about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory or lookup Burmese Laphet Salad. Stop listening to your favorite songs and tune in to some music you think you hate. Don’t make it easy. Go way out of your comfort zone and try some Merzbow. You could make a commitment to watch an entire Bollywood film that would certainly feature at least half a dozen hit songs, which would give you some idea of the music nearly 2 billion people on earth enjoy.

Other avenues await you, such as recording some video on that phone, installing Adobe’s Creative Cloud of applications on a computer, and learning video editing and storytelling. Or open up Photoshop to learn that tool. Indesign is another one of Adobe’s tools, and with it, you can collect your thoughts and photos and publish your own book.

Video, photography, and writing are not your cup of tea. Grab a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and start watching tutorials on how to make music. Download some free VSTs (instruments and effects) and just playmaking sounds until you develop some skills.

Like drawing or sculpting as a kid? Krita for drawing is free, and Blender offers sculpting as part of their suite of 3D tools and it too is free.

Feel like you already have too much screen time with your connected devices? Turn off the TV and reclaim that time so you can set your attention to productivity tools that actually reflect who you are instead of passively continuing the diet of useless nonsense. Pick up a bunch of knitting needles and make a pair of socks, or buy some clay and sculpt a blob of nothing in particular.

Still not ready for challenging your brain with learning stuff you “think” is too hard? Go to a museum, a concert of music you typically don’t listen to, a play, the opera, or go volunteer at a hospice, halfway house, or other services that help your community.

The thing is that you have to break out of your routine because your routine is potential already realized. You own the repetition of fully knowing how you do the same thing day in and day out; there is no surprise or growth with standing in place. To get somewhere, you must take a step forward. Do not take steps backward or trace the ones you’ve already walked in; where do you think they’ll get you?

In effect, you must walk on the hot coals of discomfort and over the edge of certainty. Only through the continued effort of exploring where you might fail to enjoy the chore or fail to master something will you achieve the skills you need to wear down the calluses of your own stubbornness against change.