No growth without demolition
The cost of wisdom is everything you know
“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”
–Antisthenes
Babies don’t struggle with walking because they’re stupid. They struggle because learning requires rewiring neural pathways in real-time—like digging trenches for water while the river is flowing—it’s tough. You might think of learning as accumulation: adding knowledge, picking up skills, gaining experiences. That’s only half the story.
Learning also requires unlearning. There is no growth without demolition.
Ideas you once fought to understand must be abandoned. Your hard-earned mountain peaks are now basecamps for another climb. Each version of yourself requires the death of the previous one. Learning isn’t only about baby’s first steps; it’s putting grandpa on an ice floe and casting him off to sea.
You are building sandcastles, over and over. The structures themselves matter less than the architect you become. You are the river and the stone, simultaneously carving and being carved.
With every twist of the prism, meaning shifts in new light. You may no longer “know” what you once knew, because what can be known changes as you move through time. The truth is like a mushroom1. This cycle cannot be avoided because existence itself is endless change.
Transformation, not accumulation. Death, not addition. That’s the price.
“We’re Barely Here,” Oregano Shirt Podcast, 2019.