intellectually bachelor
i have a pretty strong (and still loosely held) opinion on how to relate to ideas, concepts, or beliefs. i work as a programmer and in this field, the experienced programmers know better than to be married to their tools or technologies. in technology and especially in web which moves very fast, tools and technologies evolve rapidly. there was a time for e.g. when the trend of the time was jquery or php. most sites were being built with them. if someone only focused on learning jquery or php rather than deeper fundamentals, they would not be able to build sites with newer or other technologies, tools, or abstractions. at least, not quickly, easily, or as well. and they will soon hit roadblocks and conflicts with people who use or want to use other technologies or tools.
a well known and popular adage and another of saying this - "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". imagine you hire someone you hire to paint your house. he walks in your house introducing himself as a senior hammer man carrying a tool bag of nothing but hammers of various brands, sizes, and types. he can tell you the mass, sizes, and materials of all his hammers by heart. he might even be so experienced with his hammers, he can paint your walls with their hammers. he would likely be able to paint your house much quicker, more effectively, and easier if he used a paint brush instead of a hammer. imagine more ridiculous scenarios like the senior hammer man trying to unscrew or screw bolts with his hammer. this is essentially what it looks like to be married to ideas.
if you're reading this, you may be thinking no duh. but in practice, i see this way too often. and i've been guilty of it myself. the most pervasive ideas we become married to are those that we use to form our own identity. someone who identifies as a muslim avoiding even reading or listening to material of another religion because he is so strongly identified with a particular idea of his. he might be thinking that he will lose his identity as a muslim or that he's not supposed to because he's muslim. or imagine a father who identifies as a masculine man not wanting to play with his 3 year old child because he thinks he is too manly to do so. if such a person didn't play with his child because of his self identification as a manly man, we may conclude one of two things. that his sense of his own masculinity is quite fragile and that's why he is avoiding to play with his child. or, he is has a poor map of how reality works and that will limit his own ability to traverse reality for him and others enjoy his life. neither is good for him. the truth is he can be both masculine and playful.
reality is one undivided happening. the categories, ideas, and labels we use are human constructions. they are meant to assist us. we need not to be slaves and prisoners to them.
if a situation calls for a hammer, use a hammer. if it calls for a screwdriver, use a screwdriver. you don't need to identify yourself as a hammer man. even if you spend most of your time using and building hammers, you can still use a screwdriver. if you're muslim, you can read non-islamic texts like bibles or the heart sutra or a textbook on calculus. if you're married to your wife and you love her, you can still work with your female co-worker or talk to the female cashier without betraying your marriage. even if you are a very masculine, huge, strong, muscular strongman, you won't ruin your masculinity nor will you be prevented by your masculinity to play with your toddler daughter (see eddie hall).
the great benefit of not married married to ideas is two fold. one, we can live a more diverse, varied, complete life and that can actually help improve whatever we are specialized with. even though i spend most of my time programming and invested more than a decade in programming, recently i started working with horses at an equine therapy ranch and started doing judo. working with intimidating horses made it less intimidating for me to fight with bigger and more skilled humans and both of those experiences made it less intimidating for me to stand my ground in a corporate office. and being less fearful at work allowed me to help build better software since more of my decisions can arise from the logic part of my brain rather than the primitive part of my brain. and then learning how to cognitively handle disorder and chaos virtually makes it easier for me to handle the chaos and disorder at a horse ranch where i'm on a squad trying to feed 19 horses spread across 4 squads in 2 hours after a work day. it all feeds into each other. it's all connected. there is no actual programmer tawsif, horseman tawsif, and judo tawsif (there isn't even a "tawsif" - it's one undivided being and activity, but that's a post for another day). these are just abstractions/labels to help this body-mind organism called tawsif navigate and communicate in this dimension that is consensually created by many body-mind organisms which we collective call society.
the other great benefit to not being intellectually married is success in navigating reality. intelligence is updating your maps and models once you have new information about the territory. it used to be that people believed the earth was flat. it certainly seemed flat. it's not intuitive or obvious at all that the earth is not flat. so if you believed the earth was flat, especially if everyone around you believes it is, you certainly wouldn't be faulted. but, once you flew on a plane and saw the earth from above. and say you see photos of the earth from space. and perhaps even looked into the mathematics that prove the earth isn't flat. will you update your belief of the earth being flat to not being flat? or will you continue to believe the earth it flat? are you married to your belief? or do you want to get it right? if you're part of a town where dissenting from the consensus may get you banished, perhaps it is advantageous for you to continue believing the earth it flat. but, if you are a rocket scientist, astronaut, or pilot, such a belief may be fatal, if you can even manage to be respected enough to work with others in your field. the more aligned you are with reality and the more your maps correspond to the territory, the better you can survive, navigate, and excel in reality. the better you'll be able to get what you want.
now, you can do whatever you want. you can be intellectually bachelor or married - it's your life. what i just want to tell you is that you don't need to imprison yourself. you don't have to put yourself in a box. you don't have to be a one tricky pony or a senior hammer man or too masculine to play with your daughter. you don't have to believe the earth is flat. and even this idea of being intellectually bachelor is an idea that you can loosely hold. you can be so intellectually free that if/when it makes sense, you can even determine under what circumstances it makes more sense to be intellectually married. that's the beautify of this freedom. reality is not divided or bounded like the way we humans categorize and label. and the truth is, you are part of reality itself. and reality is free, multifaceted, and dynamic. you are reality first and foremost before you are a person who is x or isn't y or believes x or doesn't believe y.