From the transcript of last night’s Darkstream:
Advice for someone in their early 20s who wants to throw their hat in the ring but understands every wise person who says it’s unwise to trust the mind of a young man. Well, I think that what you should do is you should seek to learn, and to understand the world doesn’t need your opinions. It is very, very unlikely that any view you are going to express is going to be an original opinion. I’m not discouraging you from sharing your opinion or expressing yourself, I just think that it’s always very important to understand that, and the more that you read, and the more that you familiarize yourself with the great thinkers of the past, the more you’re going to understand how many times very, very capable individuals have wrestled with the same questions that you’re wrestling with. If you’re a good thinker, if you’re a high-caliber thinker, you’re going to find that even the most original thoughts that you have were successfully anticipated by people 2,000 years ago, 1,500 years ago, whatever, and that’s why it’s so important to read.
Of all the various humilities, I think temporal humility is perhaps the most important and least common. Are we not told there is nothing new under the sun? A reminder to all Darkstream viewers: be sure to subscribe to stream.me/voxday as a backup to the YouTube channel.