Unlearning Unlearning

I keep hearing this word, unlearning, all over the place, and the cheesy grandiosity of it really gets on my nerves. It’s not a big deal. Sounds like a virtue that just descended on us with the new era, but some people have been living this way for a long time, and now it’s something most people end up doing at some point just to keep eating.

Benjamin Franklin made his fortune early on as a printer. At 42 he handed the printing business over to his partner and moved into electricity research. After that he invented the lightning rod, then drifted into public works, politics, and diplomacy, and ended up as a Founding Father. He stepped into the next thing on top of the wealth and time the printing business had built him. He never blew up his career. He just spent the breathing room it gave him on what came next.

What Ahn Cheol-soo said on Mureupak Dosa, a Korean late-night talk show, reads in the same direction.

If you measure things by efficiency, I’m the most inefficient person in this country. The fourteen years I spent as a doctor became almost useless when I was running a company. The programming I did, that became useless when I was a CEO too. So if a successful life is supposed to be an efficient one, then someone like me would have to count as a failure. But the time you spend trying to find what really fits you — I think that time is worth something.

You can’t tell from the start what fits you. You only find out by actually doing it. The years he spent moving from doctor to vaccine developer to CEO to professor look like failure from an efficiency view, but for Ahn, that stretch was a long check on what kind of work actually fit him. Did these two get there by unlearning? I think they just didn’t treat the current version of themselves as the finished one.

I was a humanities major too, wanted to be an editor, then in 2019 I became a developer, seven years in now. There was no heroic decision behind it. Getting hired as an editor was hard, and a future where I made decent money on something I was vaguely interested in looked better than one where I made just enough doing what I loved. It worked out. I got lucky. Looking back, learning to code wasn’t all that hard. It felt more like finding overlaps with what I’d been studying all along, slowly realizing this was something I could pull off too.

These days even unlearning is cheap. The path from where you are now to a goal worth chasing has gotten very short, thanks to AI and the way information is suddenly everywhere. The panic about anyone coding through Claude Code feels out of style already. If you wanted to try product, or try design, you could start tomorrow. Things that used to belong to people with long pedigrees — molecular biology research, drafting lawsuits, filing taxes — you can take a shot at any of it if you feel like it. Unlearning has just become something you do.

It feels almost embarrassingly easy to say now. The word unlearning itself needs to be unlearned. Advice telling you to throw everything away and start over, the smug ridicule of “You still use Excel functions?” — none of it’s worth listening to. It feels like the moment has come to push further, to look down on every process and every goal, and just feel like doing things.