The Curse of Knowledge

I've had this weird feeling lately. It started about 4-6 months ago.

I'll never know/understand everything I want to know/understand

I could spend every day and every second studying and learning and mastering, but I would still barely even make a dent in the vast unfathomable quantities of human knowledge.

It's a sort of hopelessness feeling. And the more I learn, the more hopeless it feels; almost as some kind of curse. It could be argued that way indeed: ignorance is bliss.

The Genie

There's a thought experiment where a genie appears and offers you two choices:

  1. He will reveal to you a deep immutable truth, but the price is that it will completely shatter your world and you may never recover psychologically.
  2. He will withhold this truth from you and you can continue on your life, never learning the secret, blissfully ignorant

My entire life, I've always immediately selected option (1). I've always thought it absurd to not want to know the truth; Come Whatever May. But then at the same time I'm always increasingly envious of the joy that comes with blissful ignorance.

The Vastness

Maybe this is some form of a midlife crisis, but as I get older I've begun to grapple with the idea that I will die someday having never learned some absolutely remarkable thing discovered by some amazing human.

And the reason I won't is that there is so damned much of it. Maybe too much. Its not even an accessibility problem. Its just a time problem. (Although the quantity of fascinating things trapped behind corporate IP firewalls is also unbelievably vast)

Its some kind of weird educational/knowledge FOMO. Or its some kind of inverse Dunning-Kruger existential dread. It seems without fail that each time I learn some new big idea, there is an entire world-of-worlds beneath it.

And despite having huge amounts of free time, I feel completely hopeless at exploring the breadth of it all, or even understanding enough to speak intelligently about it.

The Insatiable

I should perhaps be celebrating and enjoying the mastery of the very tiny subset of human knowledge I've focused on the past 30-ish years.

But, that's not really how my brain works.

I'm oddly more fascinated by what I'm not good at than what I am. I find my own competencies to be boring or akin to yesterday's news. Though I'm sure this isn't an objective view, I'm the one who is forced to live in my own head. Others only take occasional vacations there.

Just some thoughts.