The Freedom of Saying “I Don’t Know”

I don’t know.

Three perfectly respectable words.

I have spent most of my life avoiding them.

Ask me a question and my brain immediately goes to work.

What do I know about this?

What have I read?

What have I heard?

Can I figure it out?

Is there something similar I can draw from?

Can I make a reasonable assumption?

Apparently there has been a small emergency-response team living inside my head whose sole responsibility is preventing me from ever saying:

I have absolutely no idea.

For most of my life, I thought this was curiosity.

And some of it is.

I genuinely like knowing things.

I like researching.

I like figuring things out.

I like understanding why something works, what went wrong, what everyone missed and whether there is a better way to do it.

But lately I’ve been wondering whether curiosity explains all of it.

Because there is a difference between wanting to know and being uncomfortable when you don’t.

I know curiosity very well.

I’m beginning to recognize the other one.

Not Knowing Has Never Felt Particularly Safe

When you’ve spent a large part of your life trying to anticipate what might happen next, information feels useful.

Knowing is preparation.

If I understand the situation, I can respond to it.

If I know what someone wants, I can anticipate their reaction.

If I know what could go wrong, I can prepare for it.

If I understand the rules, I can follow them.

If I understand the problem, I can solve it.

Knowing gives you something to hold onto.

Not knowing means there are variables you cannot account for.

I have never been particularly fond of variables.

This served me extremely well in some parts of my life.

Put me in an emergency and I don’t tend to panic.

I look for information.

What’s happening?

What’s confirmed?

What’s assumed?

What needs to happen next?

That’s useful when something is actually wrong.

It is less useful when applied to absolutely everything.

Eventually you can become so accustomed to figuring things out that uncertainty itself starts feeling like a problem requiring immediate attention.

So you research.

Analyze.

Google.

Think.

Replay conversations.

Look for explanations.

Form theories.

Try to make all the pieces fit.

And sometimes the most accurate answer remains:

I don’t know.

I have historically found this unacceptable.

I Thought Having an Answer Meant Being Competent

I don’t remember anyone specifically teaching me that capable people have answers.

I think I simply absorbed it.

At school, knowing was rewarded.

At work, knowing was useful.

In leadership, people came to you because they expected you to know what to do.

And if you didn’t know, you figured it out quickly.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Competence matters.

I still prefer the electrician working on my house to know considerably more about electricity than I do.

But somewhere along the way, I think I expanded the requirement.

I wasn’t only supposed to know things I actually needed to know.

I was supposed to have an opinion.

An explanation.

A theory.

A position.

I was supposed to understand why something happened.

Why someone behaved the way they did.

What something meant.

What would happen next.

What I should do about it.

I confused having an answer with being capable.

Those aren’t the same thing.

Sometimes the most competent answer available is:

I don’t have enough information yet.

We Are Living Through the Golden Age of People Knowing Things They Don’t Know

The internet has not helped.

We now have immediate access to more information than any previous generation of human beings and, somehow, this has produced millions of people who became experts approximately four minutes ago.

Read a headline.

Watch a ninety-second video.

See three posts.

Expertise achieved.

We have opinions on wars we couldn’t locate on a map last month.

Medical conditions we learned about yesterday.

Court cases where we’ve read neither the evidence nor the judgment.

Psychological diagnoses based on thirty seconds of someone’s behaviour.

Relationships belonging to strangers.

Scientific studies we haven’t read.

Books we haven’t opened.

Everyone knows.

Or at least everyone appears to.

Certainty performs extremely well online.

“I don’t know enough about this to have an informed opinion” isn’t particularly algorithmic.

It doesn’t provoke outrage.

It doesn’t establish authority.

It doesn’t fit nicely onto an inspirational graphic.

And perhaps that’s exactly why I find it increasingly appealing.

I Have Started Distrusting Certainty

Not all certainty.

I am reasonably certain I don’t want raisins in potato salad.

Some matters are settled.

But I have become more interested in how often confidence gets mistaken for accuracy.

They are not remotely the same thing.

Someone can be completely wrong with tremendous enthusiasm.

I’ve done it.

Most of us have.

The problem is that certainty feels convincing, particularly when it comes from inside our own heads.

We don’t experience our assumptions as assumptions.

They often arrive disguised as facts.

She did that because…

He obviously meant…

This happened because…

I know how this is going to turn out.

Do I?

Sometimes.

Sometimes I have experience.

Sometimes I recognize a pattern.

Sometimes the evidence is strong.

And sometimes I have taken three pieces of information, filled the remaining seventeen spaces with assumptions and presented the finished product to myself as knowledge.

Brains are creative that way.

I’m trying to catch mine doing it.

“I Don’t Know” Doesn’t Mean “I Don’t Care”

This is another distinction I think I’ve missed.

Not knowing can sound passive.

Indifferent.

Uninformed.

But there are different kinds of not knowing.

There is:

I don’t know and I don’t care enough to find out.

Fair enough. Nobody can know everything.

There is:

I don’t know yet.

Which is an invitation to learn.

There is:

I don’t know because the information isn’t available.

There is:

I don’t know because this is complicated and anyone pretending otherwise is probably selling something.

And then there is one I’ve had particular difficulty with:

I may never know.

That one is considerably less comfortable.

Some Things Don’t Come With Answers

This may be one of the hardest things I’ve had to accept.

Sometimes you don’t get to know why.

Why did someone treat you that way?

Why did something happen?

Why didn’t you see it sooner?

Why did one person survive something another person didn’t?

Why did a relationship fail?

Why did someone leave?

Why did someone stay?

Why did something terrible happen to someone who didn’t deserve it?

There is an enormous industry ready to answer these questions.

Everything happens for a reason.

The universe has a plan.

You attracted it.

It was meant to teach you something.

Your soul chose this.

It made you stronger.

It had to happen so you could become who you are.

Maybe.

But I don’t know.

And neither does anyone else.

Sometimes we reach for meaning because randomness is frightening.

An explanation makes the world feel orderly.

If everything happens for a reason, perhaps nothing truly terrible can happen without eventually being redeemed.

I understand why that idea is comforting.

I just don’t think comfort automatically makes something true.

Sometimes the honest answer to Why did this happen? is:

I don’t know.

Sometimes there may be no why at all.

That used to frighten me more than it does now.

Not Knowing Leaves the Door Open

There is another problem with certainty.

Once I decide I know, I stop looking.

I know what that person is like.

I know why they did it.

I know what I believe.

I know how this works.

I know what will happen.

Case closed.

But if I leave even a little room for:

Maybe I don’t know…

something changes.

I can ask another question.

I can hear information that contradicts what I already believe.

I can change my mind without treating it as humiliation.

I can discover that something I believed for twenty years was wrong.

I can say:

I used to think this. I don’t anymore.

That sentence feels increasingly important to me.

Changing your mind has somehow become evidence that you lack conviction.

I think sometimes it’s evidence that you were paying attention.

Sacred and Skeptical Requires Both

I’ve become interested in questions that don’t have easy answers.

Meaning.

Intuition.

Healing.

Trauma.

Spirituality.

Coincidence.

Belief.

The strange experiences people have that don’t fit neatly into the boxes we’ve built.

I don’t want to approach those things by automatically believing everything.

I also don’t want to approach them by automatically dismissing everything.

Both positions are surprisingly easy.

Everything is meaningful.

Easy.

Everything is nonsense.

Also easy.

What interests me is the uncomfortable territory in between.

Maybe.

Possibly.

The evidence suggests.

The evidence doesn’t support that.

That’s interesting.

That’s unlikely.

I can’t explain that.

I don’t believe that.

I could be wrong.

I don’t know.

There is far more room to explore from there.

I Am Practicing

These days, when I catch myself manufacturing an answer simply because someone asked a question, I’m trying to stop.

Do I actually know this?

Have I read enough?

Do I understand the subject?

Am I repeating something I heard somewhere?

Am I confusing experience with evidence?

Am I making an assumption?

Sometimes I know.

Sometimes I know enough to offer an opinion with qualifications.

Sometimes I want to go find out.

And increasingly, sometimes I say:

I don’t know.

Nothing terrible has happened yet.

Nobody has arrived to confiscate my adult card.

In fact, I’ve noticed something unexpected.

Not knowing can feel like relief.

I don’t have to solve every question.

I don’t have to understand every person.

I don’t have to explain every experience.

I don’t have to have an opinion about everything happening on Earth.

I don’t have to decide immediately what something means.

I can wait.

I can wonder.

I can learn.

I can change my mind.

I can leave some things unfinished.

Apparently uncertainty doesn’t require my immediate intervention.

This is new information.

Maybe Wisdom Isn’t Knowing More

When I was younger, I thought becoming wiser would mean accumulating answers.

You live.

You experience things.

You read.

You learn.

Eventually you understand how life works.

At this age, I seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

The more I learn, the more aware I become of everything I don’t know.

People are more complicated than I thought.

Memory is less reliable than I thought.

Certainty is less trustworthy than I thought.

Motives aren’t always obvious.

Research changes.

Evidence evolves.

People contradict themselves.

I contradict myself.

Life refuses to organize itself into the tidy explanations I once wanted from it.

Strangely, I don’t find this depressing.

I find it freeing.

Because if I don’t have to know everything, I can become curious again.

Not performatively curious.

Actually curious.

The kind where I don’t already have the answer waiting behind the question.

I Don’t Know

There are things I believe strongly.

There are things I know because I’ve lived them.

There are things supported by good evidence.

There are conclusions I’ve reached after years of thinking about them.

And there are enormous territories where I simply don’t know.

I’m trying to stop treating those territories as failures.

Maybe uncertainty isn’t an empty space we’re supposed to fill as quickly as possible.

Maybe sometimes it’s where thinking begins.

Maybe I don’t know doesn’t mean I’m uninformed, incapable or weak.

Maybe it means I’m being honest about the limits of what I can know.

And perhaps, after spending so many years believing safety depended on anticipating, understanding and staying three steps ahead, there is something quietly radical about allowing a question to remain unanswered.

I don’t know what happens next.

I don’t know why everything happened the way it did.

I don’t know what I’ll believe ten years from now.

I don’t know how much of what I currently think I understand will eventually turn out to be wrong.

I don’t know.

And for once, I don’t feel an urgent need to fix that.