The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff

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Taoism explained via Winnie The Pooh.

I remember this book meant a lot to me as a teenager, and so I found myself picking it up again now. But I was not very impressed with it, now, and I suspect that specifically the things I found clever as a teenager now seemed thoroughly facile to me.

And look, there's no way to say this that isn't staggeringly pretentious but: the things that get popular in the "popular intellectual" world seem to be things that
1) appealed to teenage me,
2) do not appeal to current me.

I do not know if I could use this information to succeed in the popular-intellectual world or if trying to fake it is impossible. I wish I could put myself back in my teenage shoes on-demand, try to understand what appealed to me then about various things, but I can't, it all just seems obviously facile and specious now. (I am curious if/how many of you all feel this too, or if I'm being singularly self-important here).

One thing I wonder about intermittently is if there's any way to fish out my brain the false claims I learned when I was younger. Anyway, I was reminded of this by a bit Hoff has a bit about a man called Li Ching Yuen, who as "officially and irrefutably recorded by the Chinese Government, and verified by a thorough independent investigation", lived to be 256 years old.

Look: at minimum, the "irrefutably" part is not correct, but I fear/suspect that I believed it completely at the time. It strikes me that life is a process of gathering context that makes you more/less credulous of certain kinds of claims; I am sure there are still things I'm credulous about that I won't be in my (inshallah) old age, especially things that happen rarely or take a long time to come to fruition.

It seems bad that a lot of my learning comes from a time when I had very little context and was credulous about many things, but the specifics are hiding in all kinds of crannies in my brain and therefore probably still being believed implicitly even though the same information encountered today would have more defences.