When Knowledge Is Free, Why Is Ignorance Still Expensive?

In an age where we carry the sum of human knowledge in our pockets, you would think ignorance would be extinct. The internet has made learning ridiculously accessible. Want to learn French? There’s Duolingo. Curious about quantum mechanics? MIT has free online courses. Need to fix a leaking pipe? YouTube has a step-by-step guide.

And yet, despite this abundance, many people remain stuck in outdated ideas, misinformation, or worse, willful ignorance. Why? Because, as entrepreneur Naval Ravikant puts it, “The tools for learning are abundant. It is the desire to learn that’s scarce.”

There was a time when learning was a privilege of the elite. In medieval Europe, books were rare and expensive, painstakingly copied by hand. Only monks, scholars, and the wealthy had access to them. Fast forward to the 20th century, and education became more widespread, but it still had barriers, tuition fees, geographical limitations, and restricted access to institutions. Have you heard those stories where entire villages contributed to send a single child (usually the male child) to the university?

Then came the internet, and everything changed. Wikipedia alone holds over six million articles in English, offering more information than an entire university library of the 1950s. Coursera, edX, and Khan Academy provide free courses from world-class institutions. Google can answer almost any question in seconds. Claude AI can develop a Python curriculum teach programming step by step for the beginner. Yet, despite this shift from knowledge scarcity to abundance, learning remains underutilized.

If knowledge is free, what stops people from learning? The reasons are many: lack of curiosity, short attention spans, or the comfort of ignorance.

Take financial literacy as an example. The internet is brimming with free resources on personal finance, investing, and wealth-building. Yet, surveys show that most people struggle with basic financial concepts. According to a 2023 FINRA study, most people couldn’t correctly answer three out of five basic financial literacy questions. Every time I come online, I see a severe deficit of the understanding of numbers. The ignorance of simple arithmetic is stark. This isn’t due to a lack of available information, it’s a lack of engagement with it.

Anecdotes abound. Zikoko has these stories in abundance. Two friends: One spent lockdown binging Netflix, while the other used the time to take free programming courses. Two years later, the latter landed a foreign job where the company offered a relocation packae, while the former still complains about job scarcity. The difference wasn’t intelligence or background, it was initiative.

One of the biggest culprits is distraction. We live in an era where social media and entertainment are engineered to capture and hold our attention. TikTok’s algorithm is a masterclass in addiction science, while Netflix auto-plays the next episode before you can even think about doing something productive.

This isn’t to say entertainment is bad. But when people claim they “don’t have time” to learn, yet spend hours scrolling Facebook and Instagram, the real issue becomes clear, it’s not time that’s lacking; it’s prioritization.

So how do we overcome this? I offered a few practical steps in a class I took a while back:

1. Make Learning a Habit – Just as we brush our teeth daily, we should set aside time to learn something new. Even 20 minutes a day adds up. A friend I learn with spends the last 30 minutes of their day on Duolingo learning.

2. Follow Your Curiosity – Learning is easier when it aligns with genuine interests. Love physics? Pick up a book. “Physics of the Impossible” by Michio Kaku that I am reading is recommended.

3. Embrace Discomfort – The best learning happens when we push past the initial frustration of not understanding something. Growth comes from challenge. It’s a good feeling I am now easily carrying more reps of weights I struggled and got frustrated with just a few months ago. Learning is discomfort.

4. Audit Your Time – Track how you spend your hours. You might be surprised at how much time is lost to passive activities. Have you ever used a to-do list that has time alloted to each activity? You should. You might want to pick my book on Time Management on Selar.

5. Surround Yourself with Learners – The people around us influence our mindset. Being around curious, growth-oriented individuals can reignite our own thirst for knowledge. It’s easy to tell kids to be careful who they are friends with. Yet there is no age that stops being good advice.

In the past, people blamed ignorance on a lack of access. Today, access is no longer the issue. The real problem is the absence of will. Knowledge won’t force itself into our brains. The tools are there, waiting. The question is: will we pick them up?

Or as Naval Ravikant might say, in an era of limitless learning opportunities, the real test isn’t intelligence, it’s desire.