Is being more "aware/educated" a blessing or a burden?

Education is the key component to life satisfaction and awareness. Never a burden. May be a challenge to achieve it, though.

Education is wonderful and opens doors in life.
Sure, it takes hard work, money, and sacrifice, but what doesn’t?

Anyone who tells you that education is a “poor investment” or a “waste of time” is either some jealous old coot or a total idiot.

Not only does education provide you with more job opportunities, it enriches your mind and enhances your life. It deepens your understanding of the world and makes you a better person. What could be a better blessing than that?

A blessing and a huge responsibility. it is necessary
knowledge is power..

Excellent answer, @seekingwolf, and all the more so coming from someone so young.

I would not want to have had any less education than I have, and if things had gone as I’d hoped I would have had a good deal more. I have compensated by being a “lifelong learner,” taking courses here and there and reading textbooks and gaining depth in my fields of interest, but you can’t get a GED for a Ph.D.

When I retire I am going to go back and take some more classes just for the joy of it. Education is one of the greatest of all ways to enrich your life.

@Jeruba

hehe thanks :)
Education is REALLY important to me and my whole family. I loved my high school and now I love my college. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

I never took these phrases to mean that one state is better than the other.

I feel it is more a comment on how fed up one can become with the world’s bullshittery.

Fat, dumb and happy not to know better? No, I’ll take education and enlightenment to empower my life, thank you.

I do think being aware and educated is a burden, but I still wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Yes it is a burden. I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

@ratboy: Are you quoting Toby Keith?

What you don’t know can kill you. Education is never a burden, although obsession with education over experiencing actual life poses its own problems.

Human beings are social creatures…
Being erudite (& here I must clearify that education does not necessarily equal knowlege as @jeruba so elegantly examplifies, even thought she’s probably more educated and certainly more knowlegable then she lead on), does not only make one ( i dont include myself in that company) stand out and thereby, to a certain degree, feel more isolated.
Having said that I guess, if one is at peace with oneself then not having many people “get you” can still be a blessing. However, not being comfortable in your own depths of contemplative solice can be a burden of loniness not many can endure.

I wonder if WE ( the learned ) are really happier or ” more ahead of the game ” than say ..those ignorant savages running around half naked in the Amazon?

I’d never trade education or awareness for anything like blissful ignorance! Being more aware has its own frustrations, but it’s well worth the while.

@Mr Callahan Education or knowledge doesn’t automatically ensure happiness, you know. I’d say happiness is something we can make come true no matter whether we have education or not.

It’s a burden for me to be conscious of how much i don’t know—but in the long run it’s better for me than ignorance and unawareness. “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Blessing

Those “ignorant savages” have to have considerable education within their own culture in order to survive as they do. I am not so sure WE are all that learned if that is a representative sampling of our knowledge.

I would think this is more a subjective style question. In one hand, knowledge is power, but the burden of knowledge, lets say in a Doctor with a family can be quite the burden in that every time he/she sees their kid’s eye twitch, they might start running a bunch of different theories in their heads.
I don’t personally feel that knowledge is a burden…I just feel that it all comes down to how you use it.

The Truth of it might upset you.

@Jeruba I wholeheartedly agree with you! I do believe too that we have no right to define ‘education’. What might be education to us may be unnecessary jargon to them. It doesn’t mean they’re more ‘simple’ either!

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Better to know the truth, and have a rational basis for action, than to stumble on in willful ignorance.