You can't understand the modern world fully because you are of the modern world. Only by establishing familiarity and a safe haven outside the modern world can you begin to do this. Our ancestors did this by studying the saints, the ancients, establishing a place outside the now.
They could also establish a mental place outside the now by familiarization with an ancient language: Classical Chinese, Ancient Greek, Hebrew. Armed with the ability to observe the modern world from outside they could begin to understand it. We on the other hand, have lost this.
Modern architecture (to pick one example) is bewildering: it seems uninevitable if your only temporal and spatial viewpoint is the here and now (and the here and now is most likely a sofa or bed or waiting room inside one of these confusing modern buildings that don't quite fit).
The same is true of all other aspects of modern life: we don't know good art from bad art because we have been reduced from active participants and creators to mere consumers. We pick/reject but rarely is the metaphysical concepts of worth, value, quality, part of the decision.
We are sick and born into a sick world to such a degree that we have forgotten what it was like to be healthy. The rot and the putrefaction has overpowered us all, rendered us senseless to each other and to any higher form of existance (or lower, as in ecological destruction).
Hence, people may laugh at my memes ("I study old buildings/monks/books so that I can learn from those who built civilization rather than those who tore it down" for example) but this is my way of making sense of the world. It isn't new: almost everyone born before 1898 did this.
I learned English by myself not to have arguments with rude people on Twitter but to access a place outside of the modern world. I don't look down on anime fans for this reason: their obsession is an instinctual understanding that their modern world and its mythology is broken.
So whether your place outside the modern world is the torah, a hadith, a saint's teaching, a sutra, the artisanal making of soaps, or anime, it all works the same: a method to find out what is broken in the modern world, and perhaps to find inspiration as to how to fix it. /End
