I get it.
I get it that you want more knowledge, of which you dream in terms of lectures, classroom debates and discussion, learning activities, required reading, homework, and thesis-making and defense.
Some of us only thrive in structure, like I do. I tried a couple of times to be on my own, to be entrepreneurial, to follow the prompts of Robert Kiyosaki’s 1997 breakthrough of a book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, only to realize that it’s harder when I do it for myself. It’s easier when I have a boss, who thinks my work is instrumental to the success of something grander than myself or my own personal dreams or my own self-enrichment.
I was, of course, raised in an age when a good job was everything, and so everything our generation did, prompted by our parents, was in a nutshell a hunt for the ideal employer. That was why we wanted to make it to good schools. That was why we moved heaven and earth for a good grade (not that I did, but I’ll discuss that later). That was why we were active in extra-curriculars. It was all so we could have a lot of good things on our resumé, which we would write to get a dream employer to say, “You’re hired!”
This was a premise widely discussed in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but this is not the point of this thinkpiece. I was interviewing a promising young kid, a magna cum laude, who was very verbose about her dream to write, to be part of a news organization like Manila Bulletin, to cut her teeth in what she saw as “a career of a lifetime.” She also has big plans to pursue higher studies, but only after she has gained enough experience on the field.
“And how much experience do you wish to gain with us?” I asked.
Without hesitation, she said, “One to two years.”
I gasped. “This is my 30th year in the business and, to this day, almost everything I do in pursuit of a story I still consider an education,” I told her.
But anyway, that was her personal plan and who am I to get in her way? So I dug deeper. Do you read fiction, I asked, do you read magazines?”
She muttered something about not reading fiction anymore and that, in its place, she was now more into self-help. As for reading magazines, she said, “I only read magazines when I’m bored.”
I gasped again. “Reading magazines when I was a child was what made me dream of becoming a lifestyle journalist, although back then I didn’t know that there was such a job as lifestyle journalism,” I told her. “I just thought I was reading people writing about their wonderful lives.”
I did think that, rather than outsiders looking in, the people whose words I read in the pages of my mother’s copies of the American Vogue, the American Town & Country, or Vanity Fair, even Life or The National Geographic, were of the world they wrote about. Some of them did write about the worlds they themselves inhabited, but others, most others—although I didn’t know this when I was 11 or 12 years old—were just doing their jobs.
Take, for example, Gay Talese, who tried and failed to get an interview with Frank Sinatra in Los Angeles, where he was sent from New York on an editorial mission in the 1960s, so, unwilling to miss his deadline, he interviewed the people around Frank Sinatra, his friends, his aides, his family, his colleagues on why he couldn’t get the superstar for an interview. As a result, he came up with what is now considered “one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published”—“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” which came out in Esquire in 1966.
But I do get it.
I do get why the young applicant in front of me on a job interview does not read magazines anymore, unless there is nothing else to do. Magazines are nowhere near as good as the magazines I was reading while growing up, not even Anna Wintour’s Vogue, although I really don’t think Anna Wintour can hold a candle to one of her predecessors, the legendary Diana Vreeland in terms of creativity. I give Wintour credit for turning magazines into a big-money enterprise, rich in commercial value, but not quite as creative, as thought-provoking, as vivid in imagination as it was in Vreeland’s time. Still, I think there are great magazines to read now, like The Monocle, which sometimes reads like a masterclass, or the weekend edition of The Financial Times.
I do get it that some people don’t read anymore, much less with passion.
What I don’t get is when people who claim to be interested in higher studies never bother to read or pick up a book, a fountain of knowledge.
I was always a bad student, but I am interested in knowledge. During the pandemic, I took up online courses in classical art, contemporary art, creative writing, poetry, historical fiction, even the art of happiness. I also took up French lessons at the Alliance Francaise. But I don’t think I ever fantasized about a master’s degree or a PhD. The classroom is no less restrictive to me than the penitentiary. But I read like crazy, even when I felt sentenced to life in a schoolroom.
I just find it so superficial to claim to be interested in knowledge, but really only in the certificate or the diploma or the bragging rights that come with it.
I don’t get the people who say “my plan is to pursue a master’s degree” in the same sentence as “I only read when I’m bored.”