With every passing day, I know less…

…but it’s not because my memory is failing.

At least I think it’s not because my memory is failing. Could you imagine if we did remember everything? How miserable, anxious and/or full of regret and resentment we’d be. It’s part of the mind’s way of preserving itself and not overloading our emotional circuitry to the point where such burden affects the surviving and thriving of the species, let’s say. Anyway, side point…um…aside, what is with this feeling of knowing less day by day despite no evidence of a cognitive decline?  

First of all, what does it mean “to know”? What is “knowing”? Is it a belief? Faith? A memory? An accumulation of knowledge and wisdom? Reason and logic itself? Perhaps love? I’m sure the answer is an eclectic amalgamation of all of the aforementioned. I think knowing what to hold and what to let go is more important than knowing what knowing is, akin to knowing what consciousness is for and how to use it properly is more important than knowing what consciousness is (which we still don’t know really and continue to philosophise over).

“The more I know, the more I realise how much I don’t know…but it’s more than that.”

There is some humility in a statement like the above, but we all must watch for our ego and insecurities interfering with the play. Like the spiritual guru who has transcended their ego and continues to tell everyone how great they are for doing so and that they can teach you how – are you sure you’ve really got beyond your ego, pal? Similar with me, am I being truly humble by acknowledging I know less or is it my insecure ego talking about how my knowledge, qualities and intelligence seems undervalue in the modern economy?

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash.

Certainty, it’s one of the things that can increase with life and yet simultaneously decrease in some areas also. Now, a lot of this does depend on how open or close-minded you are. For example, we can get to a point in our lives where we’ve seen and experienced so much that we “know” what’s going to happen, we “know” how certain are going to react or say something etc. We can also progress to a point in our lives where we’re overloaded with new ideas and information (about ourselves, the world etc) and the things you were certain about now begin to look a little shaky. Sometimes such things can rock us to our core, like an earthquake to a building, if it’s a fundamental shift.

If we think of it another way, it’s like maintaining vs updating your knowledge bank. Now, ideally, we have to do these tasks simultaneously – too much of one or the other is not good for obvious reasons – and they act in complimentary ways rather than in competition. In psychology, we have these concepts called crystallised and fluid intelligence; the former being the knowledge, wisdom and skills you’ve acquired across life through learning and experience, and the latter being your ability to adapt and learn new information, solve problems and cognitive abstraction (sometimes referred to as “raw” intelligence).

“I thought I knew about men and women, marriage and kids, what success is, what a good life is...”

It’s not so much that every new(er) idea is somehow inherently better than the previous one, nor that everything in our tradition is bad and everything new is good. It is also true that we can become stuck in our ways, unable or unwilling to cast a critical eye over the past and/or let go of what no longer serve us fully anymore. I’m tired of having unnecessary and shallow arguments and there’s less things I will fight to the death on, probably as a result of my declining certainty and feeling like I know less. This is teamed together with an aversion to the increase people’s hostility: they’re ruthless, uncivilised and they don’t care. Alain de Botton talks about this idea of allowing ourselves to learn again and I think it’s quite pertinent here.

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash.

I guess it comes to the point of how much should I care about all this? Should I just give up and concede to this modern narcissistic stupidity? I withdraw away because I don’t understand this society, I don’t like this society.

“Society keeps telling me it wants what I have, but it keeps showing me the opposite.”

Every time I run into an unsatisfactory answer, my mind keeps trying to find another one and given its capabilities it just keeps going! So much so, it starts to pose questions like, “is the reason you think you know less because you don’t know yourself (anymore) and you may have tried too hard for too long to understand and empathise with too many people, and in doing so lost/buried/sacrificed yourself? Oh, what a tremendous thing I have between my ears!

The band, Linkin’ Park, wrote that “in the end, it doesn’t even matter”, but on the contrary I still believe it does matter, and I will continue to search for ways in which it does. The irony of all this is that I know the most I’ve known my entire life at present and yet I feel like I know less and less with every passing day. Perhaps I’m growing closer to Socrates in that one day I too will know that I know nothing. Except, I probably won’t have some oracle proclaim me to be the wisest of men.

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Statue of Socrates - Photo by Felipe Perez Lamana on Unsplash.