In terms of history, geography, politics, current events: I’m a generally ignorant western / global north / anglophone type of person.

I feel like a real jackass sometimes when I meet someone from outside the narrow context I know anything at all about. And I don’t even know if their home country is an island, landlocked, what kind of climate it has, what the basic government is, what are the common languages or religions, what military conflicts it has been in, or anything else.

Trying to remediate that is very overwhelming because there is so much to know. You could spend your life just learning about the narrowest of subjects.

1. What do most regular people from around the world know about? Obviously it will be different in the details but if I wanted to be of average knowledge, what would it entail?

2. I find the very first part of of the learning curve on a new topic is the most difficult. The information has nothing to hang on in my brain so even if I understand it at the time it kind of washes away. Having even a very loose, vague understanding of european history obtained via pop culture makes it easier to retain new information. Like if something happened during the Reformation, I know when that was, some context about technology and conflicts, what came before and after. But when I read something was during a certain Chinese dynasty, I have no such frame. How to overcome this?

3. On the one hand I don’t want to be paralyzed by perfectionism, but on the other hand I don’t want to be learning too much that is flagrantly incorrect. It’s hard to judge when you are totally naive. On the third hand, it’s good to know about common perceptions of things even if they are wrong, because they are important to how people discuss and integrate. For current events equally to history.

4. How do you learn geography? I got a shower curtain that’s a world map. So it would be easy to look at regularly. It has made a very modest improvement. I still can’t identify most countries.