Autodidacticism
Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning and self-teaching) is education without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools). Generally, an autodidact is an individual who chooses the subject they will study, their studying material, and the studying rhythm and time. An autodidact may or may not have formal education, and their study may be either a complement or an alternative to it. Many notable contributions have been made by autodidacts.
Source: Wikipedia
When I was young, the motivation or validation for learning was very clear: you learn it because it is taught in school, and success is measurable in grades. (And success is important!)
As I grew up, I noticed my motivation drifted away from the simple, “Because I want good grades,” and included, “Because it’s interesting,” and, “Because it’s useful.” And later, “Because it is pleasurable.” And I thought I had a pretty good idea about what constitutes “usefulness.”
As an adult--and I mean, unequivocally an adult now, I’m not a “young” adult, I am in my 30--I am doubting the confidence by which I judge “usefulness”. When is a skill “useful”? When is certain knowledge “useful”? How do I know--for sure--that I will use something? How can I know that I will need to use something in the way that I learned it?
I now see the problems associated with obtaining the meta-knowledge: I need to know how to determine whether something is useful or not. How do I do that? Often by obtaining more collateral knowledge.
This is compounded by another problem: real-estate in the brain is finite. At some point, something will need to be overwritten.
So then the trick is to put the right skills or information in the right parts of the brain--the parts that are optimised for it. Muscle-memory can help. Some tasks or skills are better handled by System 1 as opposed to System 2.
So then the trick is to obtain a deep enough familiarity (possibly: mastery) of the skill or knowledge that it does not leak easily. .... While also not staying so far-removed from the world (new, updated information or ways of doing things) so as to fall behind.
I don’t have solutions to these. I’m only at the point where I have identified problems. I don’t even know if an optimal solution exists: it may be possible to spend an entire lifetime searching for the solution to: how to determine what is important... while also catastrophically failing to determine what is important.
Tl;dr: It is hard to determine what is important to learn and why it’s important.
