A 70s book for kids. Kind of philosophical and stuff.
When I was about 6 and freshly adopted, my mom used to read the book “El hombre que lo tenía todo todo todo” to me before sleep. Interestingly, the translation in French wasn’t the correct “The man whom had it all, all, all” but “The man who knew everything, everything, everything”.
This book is pretty complex for a kids book but I didn’t care. Just the title was enough to help me create stories by myself. “If you know everything then what? What kind of adventure would you be able to live?” Exactly. No limit.
I always have been like a sponge, absorbing anything that seemed great. It started by reading the family’s dictionary and pictures descriptions, trying to know everything about dinosaurs and volcanoes and from there, I absorbed anything. The sense of enjoying life from France, Spain and Italia, the engineering skills and rigorousness from Germany, the creativity and adventureness of the UK/US, the Zen and simplicity from Asia… I don’t give a shit. I mix everything and build my own set of rules. There’s no conflict, only challenges. My mistake was to think that you guys were doing the same. The psychological mechanism of standing up for a side is the strangest thing to me. I don’t take sides. I go through. Back and forth. Ponder. Get the best of both and move on.
Looking back at the past three years and last ten years, I feel like knowing everything now. I mean not in full detail but I got answers to everything I needed to know. I know it sounds like I lost it but seriously, I have a much better view of how things work. Systems, bias, human irrationality and human societies’ inertia, our addiction-driven brains. OK, I get it now.
Now all the dots seem connected. Sometimes I’m really bored at how we -and by we I mean you- just stay there talking about things like “OMG, this president was really awful, it’s all his fault and now I want to cry” when it’s been a while that presidents don’t really matter. They just make obvious moves dictated by systems. The war in Iraq is over? Fucking amazing, after nine years of occupation and an overwhelming support to get soldiers back home since forever. You get the idea.
I feel bored. I can’t have deep conversations with people who lack information, I can have infinite masturbatory conversations with people with extended knowledge (I hate this word, “education”). Both cases make me lean toward boredom. I’ve been able to go on and off with both, balancing out for years, but these days I feel more annoyed than ever to see behaviors looping over and over. I don’t know.
I blame this book. You are damn right ignorance is bliss. Though, I’d love to learn and fly a glider or even crazier, a wingsuit. And of course, I have so much more to do with music, games and computers. This shit is deep.