From watching Andy Matuschak sit down and study with Dwarkesh. He speaks about the notion of intention on reading. When consuming material, like a book, if you’re goal is to intimately learn the material, then a slow process of iterative understanding is important. This is a common intent on any material consumption.
When asked, is learning inherently miserable, he responds:
I think is pretty common is that you have some idea about, you’re not going fast enough, or you’re failing, or you’re struggling, and the misery comes from resisting that. It comes from feeling like you’re doing poorly and you shouldn’t be doing poorly, it’s bad that you’re doing poorly. And maybe you’re feeling fearful that others are going to judge you or you don’t have enough time or something like that. And I think that’s basically like an emotional problem that needs to get healed, rather than like a practical problem with learning
It seems to overarch with a notion of play, in a problem solving sense. Even memorising things, can you learn the thing in context (he uses an example from Organic Chemistry) a Fermi problem.
Creative contexts push an emotional response to learning but its interesting how to coin can flip both ways. In my head I’m thinking also of Hume’s idea of ideas as linked to sensation or derivable from sensation.
He then speaks about the tension, because he doesn’t always want to do his memorisation task, of learning the taxonomy of a subject, but to him the cost is just too high of not learning it. The time you waste relearning and being confused because you haven’t it memorised outweighs that discomfort.