While I was reading Politics Without Guarantees (https://thepointmag.com/politics/politics-without-guarantees/) I came across these words by Stuart Hall on intellectual work.
There is a sense in which one has to stand back, outside of oneself, in order to make the detour through thought, to approach what it is one is trying to think about indirectly, obliquely, in another way, another mode. I think the world is fundamentally resistant to thought, I think it is resistant to “theory.” I do not think it likes to be thought. I do not think it wants to be understood. So, inevitably, thinking is hard work, a kind of labor. It is not something that simply flows naturally from inside oneself. Thus, one of the perplexities about doing intellectual work is that, of course, to be any sort of intellectual is to attempt to raise one’s self-reflexiveness to the highest maximum point of intensity.
Prof. Wandia makes the case that most people struggle with thinking in her interactions with people in the digital space. One can say that you shouldn’t take all discourse online as the real representation of real thoughts as there has been many cases of paid accounts or bots that are just farming engagement. Though in every day interactions with people you can see how it’s difficult for many to connect dots. This is something that is systematic, we are taught not to think or present different thought. This is very evident through our education system where cramming is encouraged and everything is forgotten after the exam. We see comments like “work smart not hard”. With the so called age of artificial intelligence, we are told we don’t even need to read or research anymore. Just ask ChatGPT.
Should we leave this to the public intellectuals or should we get back to building brain muscles and capacities to think?
britone mwasaru 
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