Unquiet
Things

I’ve been thinking about green slime. Not in a weird way—well, maybe in a weird way. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a particular moment from You Can’t Do That on Television, a low-budget Canadian sketch show that aired on Nickelodeon in the ’80s. For those too young to remember: if any character said “I don’t know,” they got a bucket of green slime dumped on their head. Peak television, truly!

This relationship we have with uncertainty and not knowing has been rattling around in my head for years—it shows up in so much of my writing and honestly feels more urgent now than ever. We’re drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Fake news spreads faster than actual news. Even real news comes at us so relentlessly that if you don’t know how to think critically, you’re basically defenseless against the chaos.

Here’s the good news: no one’s going to dump slime on your head for saying “I don’t know.” You’re allowed to not have an opinion on everything. You’re allowed to sit out conversations where you genuinely have nothing to contribute. You don’t have to fill every silence with words just because the silence makes you uncomfortable.

In a world that rewards hot takes and instant opinions, admitting ignorance has become a radical act. We weren’t always like this. Socrates built his entire reputation on “I know that I know nothing”—wisdom starts with recognizing what you don’t actually know. But we started treating uncertainty like a character flaw instead of a starting point.

I was just reading about “intellectual humility”—basically the willingness to admit when you don’t know something. There was a study with high school students where they asked kids to rate themselves on statements like “I am willing to admit it when I don’t know something.” The ones who scored higher? They were more motivated to learn, used better study strategies, and ended up with higher grades. Their teachers, who hadn’t seen the test results, independently rated these same students as more engaged.

So here we have kids who admit their limitations outperforming the ones who project certainty. Which makes me think we’ve been taught to value the wrong kind of confidence—the kind that performs knowledge rather than seeks it. By rewarding performance over curiosity, by making it easier to fake expertise than admit ignorance, we’ve created a culture that celebrates the wrongest and worst type of people—the ones who talk loudest instead of think deepest. (Yes, I know wrongest isn’t a word, and maybe I am wrong to use it, but I think in this context it might be perfect.)

And here’s the thing that makes this even more maddening: the people who know the least are often the most confident about what they’re saying. I just learned that this is called the Dunning-Kruger effect—the less you actually know about something, the more likely you are to overestimate your expertise. Meanwhile, real experts tend to be more cautious about making claims because they understand how complex things actually are.

We’ve all been there—trapped in conversations where someone’s obviously making stuff up as they go, but they keep talking because silence feels like defeat. You know the type: they’ll tell you to turn off the GPS because they’re convinced they know a shortcut, then you end up stuck in traffic headed the wrong way, fifteen minutes late. Or they barge into conversations they know nothing about because their need to contribute outweighs their self-awareness of how little they actually understand.

Somewhere between Google and ChatGPT, we lost sight of how not knowing is where discovery begins. Google made us lazy about looking things up, but AI might be making us worse—it generates answers with complete confidence even when it’s spectacularly wrong. Just last week, the Chicago Sun-Times had to issue corrections after ChatGPT generated a completely fabricated summer reading list complete with fake book descriptions and nonexistent titles. AI is basically the Dunning-Kruger effect in algorithm form, making things up and presenting fiction as fact.

I stumbled across a study where researchers had people read articles about either “the benefits of admitting what you don’t know” or “the benefits of being very certain.” Afterward, 85% of the humility group sought extra help when they needed it, compared to only 65% of the certainty group. Something about simply reading that it’s okay to not know made people more willing to actually learn.

The smartest people I know are the ones who say “I don’t know” the most. They ask better questions. They listen instead of just waiting for their turn to perform expertise they don’t actually have. Watch any naturally curious person and you’ll see the healthy human relationship with not knowing. “Why does that happen? How does this work? What if we tried something different?” Pure curiosity, no shame attached. Then somewhere along the way we get trained that not knowing equals failure, that questions without clear answers are somehow less valuable than memorized facts.

Scientists methodically chip away at uncertainty, philosophers debate it endlessly, but artists seem to have figured something out that the rest of us missed. They don’t just tolerate mystery; they relentlessly pursue it and alchemize it into paintings, sculptures, novels, songs. They make art from the very thing the rest of us try to avoid. David Lynch built an entire career exploring what can’t be explained—and never bothering to explain it. The Surrealists made the unconscious visible, exploring the inexplicable, enigmatic, and elusive.

What if mystery isn’t failure? What if it’s possibility? Medieval illuminators spent lifetimes trying to capture divine visions, knowing they’d never fully succeed but finding meaning in the attempt. Van Gogh painted swirling night skies that no astronomer would recognize but somehow captured something true about how the cosmos feels. Louise Bourgeois spent decades excavating trauma through her sculptures, not to solve it but to understand it differently.

(And if anyone’s been wondering about my next book, there’s a few hints for you.)

But here’s what puzzles me: if admitting ignorance helps us learn better, why does it feel so uncomfortable? Why do we keep pretending we know things we don’t?

Your brain actually hates uncertainty—neurologically, not knowing can trigger the same threat response as physical danger. We’re wired to fill gaps in knowledge, even with complete nonsense, just to make the discomfort stop. Social media turned this into a performance where you’re supposed to have takes, opinions, reactions—preferably hot ones that get engagement. God forbid you just… don’t know something.

I don’t particularly enjoy being wrong, but I’m genuinely excited when someone can convince me to change my mind about something. There’s something thrilling about discovering you were looking at something completely backward or that there’s a whole layer of complexity you never considered. Sometimes, “I have no idea” is the most honest and interesting thing you can possibly say. That’s where the good stuff starts.

I keep trying to wrap this up with some perfect slime metaphor, but nothing’s landing and I can’t figure out why I’m forcing it. Maybe because the point isn’t the slime. The point is I don’t know.

And maybe that’s exactly where I need to be right now—not knowing where this is all heading, fumbling clumsily around between the thing I’m trying to say and whatever it’s becoming. Between the book I think I’m writing and the one that’s actually emerging.

The ancients used to build shrines at crossroads—those in-between places where possibilities intersect. Maybe not knowing is just another kind of crossroads, a place where transformation becomes possible. Where old certainties go to die and new understanding might be born.

Do I need to build a little crossroads altar to the unknown? Light some candles for mystery, leave offerings for confusion, and make sacred space for productive perplexity and the beauty of bewilderment?

What mysteries are you sitting with lately? What questions are you learning to love instead of trying to solve? What’s on your current altar of the unknown?

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