You Know Nothing, Jon Snow: Ring The Bells
I stopped writing a long time ago.
Ever since tools like ChatGPT appeared, writing started to feel pointless to me. Why struggle to shape a thought when words can be generated endlessly, instantly? The world doesn’t need more text. It’s already drowning in it.
But I slowly came back to rediscover something simple: Writing was never about adding more words to the world. It was about forcing a thought to take shape. Taking something vague, unstable, almost slippery in your mind, and making it precise enough to stand on its own.
And it’s also about sharing.
I often find myself in conversations, discussing the idea behind this series, and wishing I could simply point to something, a book, a scene, a video, and say: Go check this, you’ll understand my point. But I never found that one thing.
So this is me trying to build it.
This journey that we’ll take together is about how much of what you call “knowing” actually holds when you look at it closely. Not just in difficult subjects, but in the most familiar things, and in what that should force you to admit.
Let’s start with something simple.
You tap your card to pay, trusting a system of banks, tokens, and protocols you’ve never looked into. You drink water from a tap, trusting its safety without knowing how it was filtered, transported, or tested. You take medication without fully understanding how it works inside your body. I’ll repeat again, ‘cauz you jumped very fast: You swallow pills without knowing what they do inside your body.
That, by itself, is not shocking. No one can know everything. Most of life would be impossible if we had to personally verify every process behind every ordinary act.
Sometimes*, you’re simply ignorant. And that’s fine.
And our ignorance may begin even earlier than we think. There are creatures for whom reality arrives carrying whole kinds of information that never reach you at all. A shark can detect electric fields. A bat can map space through reflected sound. A migratory bird may orient through the planet’s magnetic field. To them, these are not scientific discoveries. They are part of perception itself, as immediate as color is to you. And that should make you uneasy, because once you admit that, you also admit something larger: what you call “the world” may be only the thin strip of reality that human equipment happens to catch.
But ignorance is only the outer layer.
Even when you think you know something, you usually don’t understand it.
You have heard people talk about black holes, inflation, quantum mechanics. Maybe you have talked about them too. And maybe you can say a few correct things. But try to explain one of them clearly, step by step, without hiding behind words, and you begin to feel the floor disappear.
Fine. Those are hard. So bring it closer.
You use the internet every day, but most likely could not explain, in any serious way, how a message travels from your phone to someone else’s. You rely on electricity constantly, while knowing almost nothing about how it is generated, routed, balanced, and delivered reliably into your wall. You connect to Wi-Fi, use GPS, trust elevators, flush toilets, and treat all of it as obvious. Not because you understand it, but because it has become ordinary.
And then there is the most humiliating category of all: the things that feel so familiar that your mind mistakes exposure for understanding.
You’ve seen a bicycle your entire life, but you’d struggle to draw it correctly from memory. You pull a zipper every day, but you can’t explain how those teeth lock together. The object is not hidden from you. It is right there. You have just never really seen it with understanding.
Sometimes*, you just .. don’t understand things. And that’s fine.
There are things you do not know because you were never taught them, never studied them, never had access to them. That is ordinary ignorance.
And then there are things you think you know because they are close to you, named, repeated, visible, familiar. But when you try to cash that feeling out into actual explanation, there is much less there than you thought.
So far, this sounds like something you already know.
Of course you don’t know everything. Of course you don’t fully understand most things. That’s not a revelation. That’s common sense.
But that’s not what this is about.
This series is not here to remind you that you don’t know everything. It’s here to question how much you actually know at all.
Not sometimes. Not in complex topics. Not when things get technical.
Almost all the time.
Even more aggressively, my promise in this series is to remove the previous “almost.”
But I also promise that I am not leading you toward wreckage. The point is to clear enough of the noise and vanity away that something more honest, and maybe more beautiful, can finally appear.
- Euphemism
Next > You Know Nothing Jon Snow: The Citadel.
You know nothing, Jon Snow: Ring the bells