7 Reasons to Keep Yourself Educated

7 Reasons to Keep Yourself Educated     

 1. You don’t feel like your time is wasted. The biggest thing for me is that I constantly use my free time in watching TV, playing video games, browsing facebook, etc.  While those are all worthwhile endeavors, one truly does not feel accomplished after hours upon hours of Halo 3.

2. Getting to be the “useless/useful information guy”.  This may sound unsavory, but during those awkward tensions at parties and other social events, it’s great to have some useful commentary on current events, the latest books/films, etc.  Would you rather be able to comment on the latest politician’s lack of tact, or who is dating who on The Hills? 

3. You start to understand the world around you.  Say you switched from MTV to the Discovery Channel and happened upon a special on global warming.  You had never really understood what was going on before, but now you see what the big deal is and you decide to go to the library/bookstore/internet and find out more so that you can truly have an opinion on this globally consuming issue. 

4. Your creativity gets not only stronger, but broader as well.   When asked to do a presentation, whether for a class, at work, or something just for fun, you now know about many more outlets of your creativity you never realized you had.  Your research skills have gotten better, and you realize that there are many more ways to express yourself than the ol’ powerpoint-with-a-built-in-template gambit.

5. It helps you to reinvent yourself.  When you’ve become educated on multiple subjects, and are able to have intelligent conversations with a diverse set of people, others start to see you in a different light.  This can be especially helpful when being on the dating scene, starting over in a new town, or trying to climb the corporate ladder.    

 6. Issues of life, faith, and the like start to become real to you.  So many people in our world go through life living the faith and politics of their parents, without truly thinking about the realities of their so-called beliefs.  Reading up on these issues, thinking about them, chewing on the ideas, and finding out what others believe can help you carve out your own, independent worldview.  This is very important in a culture that lives to command us what to believe as well.  Working out our beliefs on our own makes us not only an important commodity in this brainwashed culture, but a valuable member of the democratic process. 

7. The truth is more important than immediate aesthetic pleasure.  By this, I mean that if we go in and find out the histories of famous people (i.e. political candidates) and educate ourselves about what they have done in the past, we can properly guess about their futures that could affect our lives.  In addition, historical truth can affect our views on almost anything in our culture, and being educated in this truth could have huge effects on our lives. 

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