On writing, or something

hello writing writing i am writing [1]

people should write more often,

i should write more often.

I think it's unfortunate how super entertaining short formed content has taken over the world in place of slower, longer term content. There's so much knowledge available and most people don't benefit very much from it, I think people just passively consume content and then forget about it the next day. There's no learning happening, no creation of new connections in the brain, the brain just gets bombarded with new information and then gets forced to dispose of it immediately. That being said, with regards to what i said about people no longer consuming as much longer form content, i wonder if the number of people who consume long form content now and the number that consumed it in the past has remained static. Considering literacy rates, along with the fact that not all people are interested in stuff like literature, perhaps most people never consumed long form content, and made do with short form everyday entertainment. However, i do still think that people acquired more knowledge than they do now, despite having access to more information. Since knowledge was rarer, perhaps it was absorbed more readily and was considered more precious than it is now. Not only that, but since the brain had to deal with less information in general, perhaps it made it easier to store and process what little information it did come across.

I'm reminded of a story i heard ( watched? ) on youtube about the Islamic philosopher and polymath Al-Ghazali ( ال غزالی ), who as a young man was travelling somewhere when he was robbed by a gang of bandits, who demanded that he hand them all of his possessions. Most of what he was carrying then was his books, which contained all of the knowledge that he had acquired thus far in his studies. Al-Ghazali begged them to take everything he had but to spare his books, as those books contained all of his knowledge, and were very precious to him. Upon hearing this, the leader of the bandits laughed: "Did you truly possess any knowledge, considering it was snatched away so easily from you?". This had a profound effect on Al-Ghazali, and it is said that from then on, there was nothing that Al-Ghazali learned but that he memorized it. I dunno how historically accurate that story is, but the point is actually to point out the last line about Al-Ghazali memorizing everything he learned. That sounds perhaps a little exaggerated, but there's honestly a good chance it's not even all that exaggerated, as classical Islamic scholars were quite renowned for their impressive memorization skills. However that isn't the point, what i want to talk about is just how impossible it is to do the same with everything that you learn today, considering just the ridiculous amount of information available to us, along with just how advanced almost every field of study has become now, it's actually impossible to memorize everything.

Although i doubt most scholars tried to master a billion subjects at once, they only specialized in a handful of subjects and aimed for a high quality of knowledge over a high quantity. Perhaps that is what we should aim for too.

[1] i was bored one day so i decided to write something. Not knowing what to write, i just started vomitting words on the page. This is what came out, unedited ( or mostly unedited ).