If you follow me along this humble path, I would suggest keeping your interests as private as possible to avoid being mocked by blockheads who have no understanding of what compels you to study what you do in the first place. Also, there are times when this approach can make you wish you were dead, if for no other reason than there is certainly no reward to motivate you to stick with it.
I may be between a rock and a hard place, since this kind of obsessive studying may be the only thing motivating me to continue to abstain from imbibing alcohol, and on the other hand, there are moments I would not mind if the earth were struck by a giant asteroid.
A certain degree of privacy allows you to individualize your personal re-education in a manner outside the metrics of society and academia. It is difficult for me to articulate the psychological complications involved that may serve as an obstacle to learning and self-study.
The ego may be more gratified struggling with something more advanced, whereas the ego may suffer when it is forced to witness "the brain" having to equally exert itself to think about problems the ego demands "should come easy."
I will document this process. The biggest challenge is overcoming the despair that might settle in should we come to seriously doubt our mental capacity.
In what post was it mentioned that the more we are able to courageously face "the feeling of stupidity", the more we will be able to truly learn? If we cannot bear to face our "ignorance" or "the reluctance of our brains to engage in the act of thinking hard about something", then we will not attempt to remedy our ignorance out of this fear of seeing ourselves as "not so smart".
Not to brag, but I consider what I am doing to be a remarkable defiance of the tendency for "education" to make someone willfully ignorant. Look at education geared to specialization. Very often I suspect that formal education might give the graduate a false sense of mastery over a subject, and there is that intellectual snobbery which we witness, not just from others, but from within our very own brains when we restrict what we will study to "more advanced" subjects, and thereby depriving ourselves of any opportunity to revisit the subjects of our earlier school days.
Some of those subjects are fundamental.
I won't go on and on about it, but please know that I do not feel any shame about revisiting the fundamentals. In fact, my biggest struggle is with the ego, that is, facing the reality that most exercises require me to pay attention and to ... think ... and thinking is difficult, right? Thinking becomes especially difficult if we live with the delusion that certain things ought to come easy to us, or that we are exempt from having to think too carefully since we have something called a "diploma". Such diplomas do not exempt the holder from having to think about a mathematics problem just because that problem is in a high school text book.
In fact, some of the exercises at the end of the sections in certain high school text books may be more challenging than many of the exercises in certain college level text books, so, here again, Nothing that is so, is so.
I want to say right here and now that it may be Holden's radical honesty which has inspired me to revisit the fundamentals, and to learn how to relax with what Schopenhauer called the "difficulties of arithmetic".
I hate to use such contradictory language, but I think the key to nurturing the spirit of lifelong learning might involve allowing myself to feel more stupid.
I am not after any degrees or certificates. What I crave now, more than ever, is understanding - and not only understanding, but the ability to exert however much mental energy as I have to in order to stretch this brain out of complacency.
Again I say that this may have more to do with psychology than mathematics itself. I think I may be just trying to activate my brain, to let it know that it does not have to study a physics textbook in order to be challenged. Maybe this is a psychological experiment to see if I can work through these texts without feeling that this is some kind of reflection on my aptitude. It's a complicated experiment that is difficult to explain. I suspect there are many who are in positions of authority, even academic authority who might be surprised how frustrating it is to try to learn something you're not interested in. I am curious to see if I can muster interest.
And, you know, there are times when I feel guilty for even worrying about "self-education" when there are those begging for a fistful of flour. I suppose it is a privilege and a blessing to be concerned with self-education.
Without the grocery stores and "money" for food, without a place to rest my head, I suppose this world is a nightmare. And so, I do count my blessings and try not to complain too much about my so-called "struggles".