In my view, you are very lucky you can ask this question. It means you don't have external stimulation big enough to not have time to think about these matters. I don't want to be silly, but if you'd be hungry, jobless or having a lot of stake at risk, your brain would imidiately switch to "get shit done". So much for external motivation.
Internal motivation, thats another story, which everyone need to figure out themselves. Still struggling myself.
I think that jewelry should have a property of showing off, so hidden private key wouldn't work that well. You need to have some mechanism how to show status. And that nicety factor was driven mostly by women decorum.
I see this events roughly the same. The romantic emotional turn against rational enlightenment, can be seen nowadays. In a broader picture, you could see this oscillation of rational / irational (objectivists / subjectivists ) cycles all over history. Someone surprised by this events seems ignorant of history, and how people can actually behave.
Your experience could serve as limitation to your view of the world. Younger ones without the baggage of experience, has greater chance of discovering new approaches. Due to this, population with changing generations, might be more intelligent than one without these clean slates.
imho usually the best books, are those complex ones, which I read for 4 months. Because after every page, 15 new questions arise, where settling them takes time, and then internalization of that wisdom takes time as well. And I don't even mention, that best books get better after re-reading.
In this light, 300 books in 4 years, seems quite a lot...
Anecdotally, one girl loved Harry Potter books. After acquiring basic level of foreign language, she would re-read those books in that language. As she knew the story back and forth, new words came to her in very familiar context, and learning was much more effective. I'd be interesting to research more this method !
I've read a critique of this approach, which critiques the basis of this assumption - "laws of physics". It goes like, that living systems does not follow laws of physics completely, but rather, as time progresses, establish new laws. And we have the word Emergence now. New laws emerge from within the interactions of the system, they are not posed apriori.
Would be happy if someone more knowledgeable could elaborate.
to add, I would say, the limits of human imagination are cognitive limits posed by the physical limits of our brains. Let's say cognitive biases, you can't completely unbias yourself. You could argue, that with coming technology, we can modify the biological basis (those limits), but just go more meta. We will have limits about how to modify those limits.
That's perfectly aligned with capitalistic motivations