IDK
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Dear Bolu,
Do you dislike certain words or phrases? Are there specific things people say that annoy you slightly, provoke a tired sigh, or merit a disapproving nod? It could be anything—a silly proverb, a poorly-reasoned maxim, a word too anachronistic for these obviously sane times, an unholy English translation of a Yoruba saying, a title you hate being called, or even an innocuous phrase that you simply can’t stand. Do you have such items on a mental list? If yes, I’d like to know some of them. Perhaps we share common enemies in the language realm and we can collectively plot their death. It is death or nothing for these words, of course, so if your kind heart demands that these offending words be tried in court, be gone. This is not a crusade for the sympathetic. A judge will give these words a sentence, and that is not a favourable outcome—in fact, it’d only serve to improve their popularity. So it must be death. If it isn’t death, it’s expiration. And if isn’t expiration, it’s nothing.
For a good while, a phrase that made me sour was “I don’t know”. “I don’t know” is as simple as a phrase can be and worded differently, it’s a self-acknowledgement of ignorance. I recognize that there’s nothing inherently wrong with admitting ignorance, so I didn’t have a problem with the phrase in certain contexts, particularly on matters of facts. Say I asked you for the tenth digit of pi, the height of the Great Sphinx of Giza to the nearest metre, or the full cast of Zootopia, it’s okaay if you respond with “I don’t know”. These are facts that you have stored somewhere in your head or nowhere at all—the slight exception being the tenth digit of pi as it’s computable with some effort—so you either know them or you don’t. Facts are doubly removed from personal opinions, and this was always clear to me. As such, I never had any issues with “I don’t know” being used in such a manner. There are also situations wherein the speaker is obviously trying to kill a topic of conversation and I could tolerate hearing "I don't know" in such events.
My disdain for “I don’t know” rather manifested when the matter at hand was of a personal or subjective nature in a conversation the speaking parties are happy to have. Why do you prefer Coca-cola to Pepsi? What are you mad about? Why did you choose to vacation in Tbilisi and not Antarctica? When cooking, how are you able to tell how much salt is enough without tasting the soup? I never liked it when people responded to such questions with "I don't know". How don't you know? How are you unable to justify your choices? I generally chalked it down to laziness. People, I concluded, are too lazy to think about these whys and I didn't appreciate such attitudes, more so when I really needed the information. I always felt the answer lay in our heads somewhere. We only needed to seriously ask ourselves the question, and I frowned when people failed to do that.
I also didn’t like it when people prefaced their answers to a question with “I don’t know”, and then go on to give a response so detailed that in fact suggests that they actually know. Pick a side, dammit! And to side-track a bit, there are others who think that “just because” is a satisfactory answer to a question. “Why did you make purple braids?” “I dunno. Just because”. Just because what? Please. It’s not even a complete sentence.
These days, however, I’m not quick to frown whenever people say they don’t know the answer to a question no matter the question. In fact, I now frequently say “I don’t know” and I believe it’s because I’ve realized that more often than we care to admit, we’re not aware of the true motivations for our choices or the drivers of our actions. There’s so much going on beneath the surface of our consciousness that we should be forgiven for not being able to take a plunge into that sea of unconsciousness that holds all the answers. I’ve also come to appreciate the honesty in admitting you don’t know when you truly don’t know. There’s an extant pressure to rationally justify the decisions we make, and we risk bullshitting when we give in to that pressure. “How did you know the bug was in that line of code?”, a colleague may ask. You may be tempted to say that you put two and two together so the bug could only have been on that line, leaving your colleague in awe of your abilities. You may truly have put two and two together. Or you may have had no idea how you knew the identity of the buggy line and simply worked your way backwards to give the simplest rational justification—I put two and two together. It’s the case sometimes that we don’t know—we just know. And we shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit that.
So when I ask Patrick why he chose Jane and he says he doesn’t know, I’m sad but not upset. "I could give you a thousand and two reasons, each one as ordinary as the next, but I really don't know why", he says with the colour of bliss on his face, and I understand. We fall in love for reasons so ordinary they escape our conscious thought. He even knows a thousand and two of them, yet he doesn’t know why it’s her and not me. Again, I totally understand. I’ve been there, and I still am, dear friend.
Fin.
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Write you soon, merci!
- Wolemercy
Amazing read, as always, man.