A little over a year ago I joined LearnedLeague with a few friends from college, figuring it'd be a fun daily trivia activity that I'd try to compete in but wouldn't take too seriously. As it turns out, there were a LOT more things I knew absolutely nothing about than just the stuff folks do or follow for entertainment. I got stomped. It's head-to-head matches, six questions per day, and you assign points to your opponent based on how likely you think they are to get them right. It took me until the fifth day until I got even a single question right. It was a major relief when I saw the scoring the next day to see that I didn't have the shame of yet another zero.
Still, things did not get dramatically better. By the end of the 25-day season, I had answered 18.7% of the questions correctly, or just over one-per-day. I was in the bottom 3% of all 11,000-ish players in LearnedLeague. It legitimately made me feel dumb. I've felt that way plenty of times before -- just ask me to build something, fix something, or do pretty much any manual task and my mind becomes a blob of goo. But about knowing things? I did well enough in school. I didn't think I could rate this poorly.
However, when I think about the way I've spent much of my life and my general approach to learning, it makes a good deal of sense. In high school and college, unless the topic was math or science related (and sometimes, even if it was), my attitude was to memorize the shit, pass the test, and forget it forever because dammit, there is no way in hell that I am going to need to know anything about the 1938 Munich Agreement for the rest of my life.
Oh give me a break.
Furthermore, I didn't exactly use my free time to immerse myself into the culture. While others explored new TV shows, saw movies, and read books in their spare time, I spent a good deal of time playing video games, often repeating the same ones. Others discovered new music, while I listened to a small crop of songs on repeat, many of which were obscure. For about six years from 2004-2009, I tried to cram as much poker-playing into my life as possible. That made for some fun, interesting experiences, and some good stories, but it didn't do anything for passive absorption of information. Even after quitting poker, it was difficult for me to push myself to experience new things on my time. I'd often opt to watch re-runs of shows or movies rather than trying something new, because God forbid I might not like it and realize I had ::gasp:: wasted my time.
After considering all of this, it's overwhelmingly obvious why I woke up in the year 2017 not knowing anything about anything. I've spent most of my life actively rejecting knowledge except that which I deemed pertinent to my career.
So after my first season of LearnedLeague, I was pretty mad that I performed much worse than people I was friends with and a legion of smart people that I've never met. I can probably count on one hand the number of activities that I both enjoy and am bad at -- golf is probably the only one I can think of off the top of my head (and I am horrid at golf...if you think shooting a 110 is bad, don't talk to me). There were only two options. Either I work to get a LOT better at LearnedLeague or I quit it forever. The problem is that I still had no interest in Da Vinci's paintings, or the Franco-Prussian War, or the states of Australia, or movies made in black-and-white, or TV legal dramas, or boxing, or Shakespeare, or Greek mythology, or the myriad other things that are completely obsolete to my everyday life unless they appear in a trivia question.
So what was going to win out here? My extremely petty level of competitiveness or my honest-to-God apathy toward what I perceive to be useless information? Would it be the gym class hero or the habitual watcher of re-runs?
With me, the gym class hero wins every time.
So I plowed ahead with LearnedLeague and tried to get better. I've tried memorizing new things and reading books on different topics. I now record every episode of Jeopardy!. I began listening to a trivia podcast about a month after making fun of someone in my mind for telling me that they listen to a "trivia podcast". It sounds like a lot of effort, and it is, but there have been some benefits in the form of lifestyle changes. I've basically quit watching TV re-runs and have mostly phased out video gaming. Whenever I'm going to spend my spare time on entertainment, I make the choice to experience something new. Hell, I even sample some old movies now. I watched The Sting the other night and liked it a great deal. Is it all being done due to this stupid push to be competitive at an online trivia competition with no prizes? Yeah, probably. But it's also probably going to make me more well-versed in the culture and such, which is good, I guess.
Make no mistake -- I'm behind the 8-ball here. Trying to rapidly (re)acquire a lifetime's worth of knowledge on the wrong side of 30 is no easy task, as my brain's capacity for memory and learning is no longer what it was. But I have improved...I've since gotten about double the amount of questions right that I did in my first season of LearnedLeague, and while I'm still in the bottom quartile of players on the site, at least I can say good-bye to my days in the bottom 3%. Hopefully this means my learning capabilities aren't quite fried yet.
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