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The density of learning

After booking the IELTS exam for late September, I started preparing for tests again—something I hadn’t done in years. I restructured my schedule, waking up at 7 a.m. and leaving the lab two hours before bedtime to carve out time for English practice. My first reaction was exhaustion and a sense of lost youth.

The last time I prepared for IELTS was about six years ago. I can still recall the rhythm of dormitory-classroom-library and the satisfaction of constantly absorbing new knowledge. Despite that semester’s heavy course load, I never felt rushed. Both my IELTS score and GPA wasn’t particularly high compared to later semesters, yet I was most satisfied with my learning state then. I’ve often looked back on those months of dedicated immersion, wondering if I could ever recapture that feeling.

Something familiar has returned these past few days. No matter how exhausted I feel before starting IELTS practice, I gradually settle back into that comfortable flow during listening, reading, or writing. Every minute brings either a test of existing knowledge or contact with new expressions, and my attention flows seamlessly between them.

I’ve experienced this same engagement while coding challenging problems or writing papers. But these moments were rare. Most of my work was visualising data for colleagues’ projects or “beautifying” figures that could be presented more simply. I felt no comparable engagement or satisfaction in these kinds of work, which unfortunately comprised the majority of my time since starting my Ph.D.

Initially, I attributed this to the purposeful, redundant nature of such tasks. But coding and writing for my own projects share these characteristics, as does IELTS preparation. Then I remembered my response after I got criticized for not taking it seriously enough to revise an article that I wasn’t originally involved in: “I can’t learn anything from revising this all day, and I can’t stand it.” Could learning density be the key difference?

When visualising data for others or complicating figures, I can still learn something, but at such low density that I feel downcast and bored. I can recall only four instances of feeling ignited by discovering interesting new knowledge in such work, and those feelings never lasted. The learning density was consistently low.

But how do I maintain exposure to new and interesting knowledge that’s neither too difficult nor too easy for me? Perhaps more fundamentally, in a society marked by alienation, is it truly possible for anyone to live such an intellectually fulfilling life?

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.

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