The Summer of Unlearning
Summer arrives, and with it, a subtle shift in the light. The long evenings seem to stretch time itself, offering a brief reprieve from the usual frantic pace. For years, I treated this season as a productivity sprint. I’d curate ambitious reading lists, promising myself I’d finally ‘get through’ the towering stack of saved articles and half-finished e-books. My digital hoard, a monument to good intentions, would mock me from the cloud.
But this year feels different. The heat brings a kind of lethargic clarity. The very idea of ‘getting through’ my reading list suddenly feels as burdensome as a winter coat in July. It’s not the content I’ve grown tired of, but the mindset. The compulsion to capture, to organize, to efficiently metabolize information has started to feel like the opposite of learning. It feels like hoarding.
So, I’m trying something new. I’m calling it the summer of unlearning. I’m not abandoning my feeds or my note-taking apps, but I’m changing my relationship with them. Instead of seeing a ‘Read Later’ list as a to-do list, I’m trying to see it as a pond. Some days, I might skim a few leaves from the surface. Other days, I might just sit by the bank and not dip a hand in at all. The goal is no longer completion, but presence. It’s the difference between studying the map and feeling the sun on your skin.
Letting the Breezes Blow Through
This unlearning extends to my note-taking as well. My personal knowledge management system, once a fortress designed to capture every fleeting thought, is now getting a few windows opened. I’m leaving more things unsaved. I’m reading articles and, instead of meticulously highlighting every salient point, I’m just letting myself sit with the one idea that truly resonated. I’ll jot down that single thought, maybe a connection it sparked, and then let the rest go. It’s a practice in trust—trusting that if an idea is truly important, it will find its way back to me.
There’s a season for gathering and a season for winnowing. Summer, with its languid energy, feels like the perfect time for the latter. It’s a time to let the intellectual breezes blow through the cluttered rooms of our digital minds and clear out the dust. It’s about quality of attention over quantity of acquisition. The leaves will fall soon enough, bringing with them a new season of gathering and structuring. But for now, the only curation I’m interested in is curating a sense of calm, a little more space, and the permission to simply read for the joy of it, without a system demanding a receipt.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: