I Don’t Know

May 31, 2026

Have you noticed a rise in the know-it-all population lately?  Of course, the pejorative term is meant to be sarcastic and facetious; yet still, In a way, I’m starting to feel like a child again, with more and more of my peers chiming in: “Well, actually Zach…”.  

At the risk of sounding like an insecure dummy, is this because they’ve finally, and perhaps inadvertently, been made aware of the idea that knowledge is power, and they’re just now testing it out?; or is it because modern conversations are centered around digitally-based interests, to which everyone has granted themselves constant access?

Baby Biggs

In the big picture, intelligence could once be measured by how far a person’s ideas might carry an entire generation into the future (at least that’s always been the hope). And it would make sense that our personal intellect could and should have the same influence on a smaller, more community-based scale.  

But instead of planting this knowledge into tangible networks and helping them grow, we strive for personal advancement, for bigger, for more– sometimes to the point of neglecting the needs of ourselves and those within our own tribes.  Think about a distant uncle who’s earned 3 doctorates, owns 6 patents and received a national award for civil engineering last year, but has never danced a step in his life: “I don’t dance because I know that I look ridiculous and I know that I won’t like it”.    

Yes, let us gaze upon this brilliant, half-drunk, grumpy man-bear, seen sulking at the table throughout his only daughter’s wedding.  Cousin Hillary is supportive though: “Yeah, he looks super pissed and uncomfortable, but he’s just, like, really smart. K, bye!”- nevermind the fact that Hillary waltzed, instead, with her new puppy “Baby Biggs” for the Father/Daughter dance.

The meaning of the word “intelligence” seems to be shifting; or perhaps it’s simply become too subjective to pin down in the modern world.  The same goes for the word “successful”; we may recognize when a famous athlete or physician has absolutely mastered their field of expertise, but after burning through 4 marriages and being convicted of multiple felonies, are they still considered successful?  Intelligent?  Or can we simply consider them human beings?

Where does happiness fit into any of this?   When the heuristic for determining success or intellect is financially-based and/or a staggering percentage of the population agrees with a hip-hop artist or a politician who has reminded the world repeatedly that they themselves really, actually, are a genius, we can already see where this is all headed– and happiness doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on the map. 

How Do Ya Like Them Apples?

Tech Talk!: Facts within the digital realm remain largely secondary to opinions, because the only thing that makes us feel better than holding onto an opinion, is evidently smattering it across multiple platforms as a more desperate, pandering version of ourselves IRL; squirming with either delight or disbelief, depending on the reactions we get, which serve to revalidate our position over and over again, until it becomes a fact that we can share confrontationally in the break room at work.     

We don’t need fancy degrees to feel important online, hell, we don’t even have to be fully clothed; all we have to do is become really good at looking up stuff on our device of choice and then typing/talking about it as if we created whatever slop was consumed in the first place.  For a time, this works because we’re smart enough to bring up topics we’ve already researched by scrolling through click-bait and the docu-sci-ro-fi-medy series collections.

Until that comprehension is challenged by someone who is actually speaking to us face-to-face, and who clearly possesses a broader understanding of the world from reading books, traveling, and participating in meaningful interactions with other people; rather than socially flailing, like an infant being fed through a screen.  

We may become defensive or dismissive when encountering an individual who is truly wise; hell, we may imagine calling them a know-it-all or even tellling them to fuck off.  The irony is that, as a society, the percentage of adults who read actual books is staggeringly low, most dietary choices are a certifiable disaster, and we’re losing the ability to communicate with one another beyond the level of Tweet-speak– yet, our increasingly misguided opinions are becoming stronger than ever. 

In the film, Good Will Hunting, Robin WIlliams (playing a therapist) delivers a poignant monologue to his genius, yet troubled and hard-headed young patient:  “You could give me the skinny on Michelangelo, but I’ll bet you can’t you tell me what the Sistine Chapel smells like? You’ve never actually stood there, and looked up at that beautiful ceiling…If I asked you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet”.  In other words, you’re too busy reading about life, instead of living it.   

Will’s misfortunes and legal battles were the result of heavy trauma and having experienced nothing positive outside of the pages of information he’d consumed.  We’re not that unlike Matt Damon’s character, it’s just that we’re racking up web pages instead of book pages– and only reading the big letters.  

Don’t get me wrong, if we were all reading 7 books a day, but beating people up and getting arrested all the time, we wouldn’t last very long as a species.  Regardless of who is “smahtah” and who is “dummah”, by fussing around with the endless swarm of facts and information without experiencing anything tangible, we’re all missing the point. 

Kafkaesque

Along with “success” and “intelligence” another word that might be spinning into a drain of ambiguity, is “curious”.  As we notice in the way children grow and develop, curiosity can be a beautifully essential concept.  It is what paves the way for wisdom to expand, but only if we can actually feel it, see it and touch it– whatever “it” is.   

“It” can be something singular and remarkably fulfilling; or “it” can be an endless stream of content that has our curiosity anesthetized from overuse.  When most of our sensory input is coming from the same bright little source, that is where we shall expect to find every answer imaginable; but it will also play games with our curiosity and test it beyond the limits of anything we could have ever conceived.  

This imagination of ours can now be sought and fulfilled so abruptly and cheaply, that we completely lose the middle ground.  When no steps are taken on this quest for knowledge and connecting the dots becomes as basic as sneezing or belching, then we’ve lost our true “why?”; curiosity becomes nothing more than a question, followed by a subsequent answer, sans the journey– and everyone is smart, because they can just look it up. 

Success, intelligence, curiosity, imagination: every word, every single idea, is being redefined and rebranded every minute of the day, along with its associated “why?”. This metamorphosis is evolutionarily accurate, it’s just hitting us at a much faster rate than we expected.  

We have the ability to get ahead of this, to take real experiences back and reclaim true connection, so that we may proliferate wisdom in its most natural form.  If there is a workable theory that intelligence and success are being redefined, then perhaps the redefining of curiosity and imagination doesn’t have to look so bleak or confusing; In fact, many of us creative types may jump at the opportunity to explore a new and mysterious persona.

When we attend a presentation or a lecture, or tune in to a TED Talk, we’re interested in what an individual knows about a specific subject in which they’ve spent years or even decades studying.  If we had the chance to meet them, we might be intimidated by their breadth of knowledge; until we discover that they cannot cook like us, yoga like us, sing like us, jiu-jitsu like us, or do whatever weird shit we like to do, nearly half as well as we can do it.  

We are all truly unique and truly intelligent people understand that wisdom only works through natural curiosity; and they have been comfortable, at some point, uttering the words “I don’t know”, without needing to ask Siri.  Maybe we can start to chip away at the shame these words might bring and, instead, use them as a jumping off point, toward things that are not only worth knowing, but worth living.