The Lonely Peaks of Self-Directed Education

Solegria (n.) — A kind of joy that you only experience by yourself.

Bibliosolegria (n.) — The inability to share the joy of synthesis emerging from a combination of books that only you have read.

I coined “Solegria” after reading the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a book of words coined by John Koenig. I realized that I needed a Dictionary of Obscure Joys to describe my spontaneous mash-ups of interests that I cultivate in isolation. Being a book nerd, “bibliosolegria” is a must-have in that dictionary.

In case you don’t know, I’m a dedicated autodidact. I deliberately didn’t continue schooling after college because I didn’t want to think like my professors. Being a radical and an infinitely curious person, I really needed to experience the challenges of life as an intrinsically motivated, transdisciplinary thinker, AKA, a brown pelican. A brown pelican is a bird that glides broadly over the water searching for fish, and when it finds one, it dives deep and gets exactly what it’s looking for.

That’s my learning style.

I’m always cultivating breadth. Attempting to understand what I now call “the Intrinsic Motivation Paradigm” has required not only the practice of intrinsic motivation, but an understanding of complexity and all that motivation touches. I’m a big debater — I stand firmly on the side that intrinsic motivation can and must be the operating principle of society. And that takes a lot of knowledge to defend. To argue that intrinsic motivation can drive all that makes life worth living is a pretty big claim. So I learn as much as possible to challenge my own claim, as well as to defend it.

That’s not all that motivates me to learn. Learning is intrinsically valuable to me. Depending on the moment, I could be learning ballet, piano, accordion, trombone, a little bit of astrophysics (for people in a hurry), clouds, programming, complexity theory, farming, and of course, anything having to do with collective liberation. Those are just subjects anyway. Learning how to live life joyfully, adventurously, and with a sense of humor is always an unfolding process, especially when practicing emergent strategy.

Every so often, epiphanies make their way into my brainspace. When I got out of the Origins of Life class at Santa Fe Institute, I could see so many parallels between biological and socioemotional phenomena. I saw how feedback loops could map onto compounding effects of emotional transformation, I understood how the relationship between philosophy and society was a chicken-egg situation, and I intuited that the interdependence of structure and function applied to social beliefs as well as ribosomes. As I walked along the red Santa Fe trails, grateful for my existence at this time in humanity and my position in relation to the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the title of my book-in-progress “The Strange Loop of Purpose” came to me while looking at the clouds. It was a profound moment, and I found a lot of difficulty sharing it with anyone who’d appreciate it.

When you start to stack unique knowledge together, it gets lonely. The less people you have to talk about it with, the more ephemeral it gets. Pretty soon, it’s almost like it never happened, and your carousel of interests keeps turning until the synthesis is ready to sneak up on you again.

When it does, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone in your immediate vicinity has studied the same things that you have, or that you’ll have the patience to explain both a strange loop and the basics of the Intrinsic Motivation Paradigm long enough to get to your new and exciting point of clarity. Upon experiencing such peaks, you are faced with the choice of (a) spending more time alone to cultivate that joy, pushing you further up the peak, and hence to more isolation, or (b) facing a sea of incompatible companions at the expense of your own interests. In order to find meaning beyond that peak, you’ll need patience and an extremely adaptable skillset of intellectual solidarity, authentic expression, and community design.

It’s not easy.

As Self-Directed Education (SDE) becomes more popular for people of all ages, I hope that we as a culture can allow for more free association within and across minds. I hope that more of us become intrinsically motivated generalists with the ability to engage in all kinds of transdisciplinary analogies and curiosities. I hope that intellectual solidarity can form the fabric of the Intrinsic Motivation Paradigm, and we can all have company in our uniquely-cultivated joys.