I recently let a magazine subscription lapse after a single year. I had tried the publication out last year in the hope that its mix of art and theology, science and community would provide useful perspective and interesting reading. I found that the magazine was infested with Third Decade Instrumentalism.
Third Decade Instrumentalism is a malady in which newly formed adults shortly past their second decade become aware of the breadth of their own perception and assume the role of educating the rest of humanity. "Now that I have a grasp of the entirety of human wisdom," the thinking goes, "it is my role and purpose to tell everyone else the truth of everything."
Or perhaps the young thinker retains a shred of humility and claims only the outline of all wisdom. The gaps and details can be filled with snippets borrowed from greater philosophers which we neatly cut to fit. They may be are quite proud of this humility, shredded as it is.
It is an expansive view of one's own intellectual power which suffers from looking beyond one's own horizon. In actual reality we cannot see forever; the earth is round and the horizon is 10 miles, more or less.
Once I was briefly afflicted with a bit of Second Decade Instrumentalism. At that younger age I was only impressed by the breadth of my objective knowledge as opposed to the more pretentious claim to wisdom. I had the idea to write down everything I knew. Partly this was to help me pass my knowledge on and partly it was to set an Ebenezer on my intellectual journey, a way to say "this far I have come". One may rephrase that as a celebration of my own accomplishments.
Contemplating why that effort failed has been a continuing source of diversion through the years. At the time I expected the biggest difficulty would be remembering everything I knew. (There was so much material, I thought.) It turned out that the most persistent of many difficulties was determining what I really knew and distinguishing that from what I only thought I knew and what I thought someone else might know. During that project I never advanced to the distinction between understanding and memory or between facts fully internalized and those you merely recognize as having previously been asserted. That there might be a whole realm of epistemological thought did not yet occur to me.
I think that Second Decade experience may have inculcated a distaste for undertakings which are even more grandiose than my own, for Third Decade Instrumentalism in particular. Perhaps my reaction is nothing more than having experienced enough of that particular style of hubris. Whatever the reason I let the subscription lapse.