The Adamantly Ignorant

How many times a week do you have conversations in which someone is spewing off a slue of facts about something they have very little knowledge about? Treating knowledge as a novelty. You may have known this person your entire life, you may have just met this person yesterday; what you know for sure about him is that he is not a doctor, scholar, or specialist in any way and yet he never seems to stop yammering about every topic from dietary needs to cultural customs in Southeast Asia (even though he's never been there). It seems in fact that the less one actually knows about any one topic, the more one tries to appear to know about every topic under the sun. It's the interesting conundrum of being intellectually curious in a culture of specialists.

If you went to college you most likely received a degree in one particular area of focus and while you are proudly knowledgeable in that one area you do not claim to know more than someone who specialized in a different area. For example, an accountant isn't going to pretend to be a dietitian and a botanist isn't going to pretend to be a journalist. Thus, college grads spend a lot of time out networking in the world trying to get someone who knows something to help in the areas of their life where they are ignorant. However, if perhaps you didn't go to college, or your degree was in something specifically related to liberal arts you didn't come away from that experience with a narrow focus. Instead you came away with the big picture and, for many of us, so broad of a focus that anything seems possible and everything seems pointless. You are smart, but unqualified and the sad truth is that the areas you know something about all have specialists that know more than you do. Thus, you're almost just as bad off, if not worse off, (in a practical sense) than you were before you started school. At least before college your job prospects were minimal and your friends were all in the same boat. After college, all of your friends are getting started with careers and you feel like you should be too, except that you aren't qualified to do anything minus entry-level positions, which may or may not require a degree at all! Now you're just a know it all with an ego and no job prospects. I'm there. It's frustrating. However, not as frustrating as the adamantly ignorant.

The adamantly ignorant are those people who not only aren't qualified to do anything, but have made a lifestyle of not knowing. They are proud of knowing nothing about the world and arrogant about the fact that they still make enough money to drink like obnoxious teenagers and take petty vacations to tourist trap destinations. They don't want to hear information that strays from how they can make more money, who won the sports game last night, or how much you drank last time you went out socially--at least it's this way on the male end. On the female end it's more about how much money you make, how much money your husband makes, and where you bought that, "Gorgeous pair of earrings, I simply must have a pair!" Or another cop-out of sorts, in this humble writer's opinion, is not knowing because you're religious and extraneous information somehow separates you from the meek, "whom are going to one day inherit the Earth." I'll go ahead and say to those people, sorry, acting meek while driving a thirty-thousand dollar car and going to a multi-million dollar church and living in an extraneously large house in the suburbs away from all the real poor people is probably not quite what your spiritual visionary of choice had in mind. Save yourself the embarrassment of hypocrisy and just learn something worth talking about. Anything really. It doesn't have to be astrophysics. Just making an effort to read or engage in American culture on a level deeper than chain stores and fast food gives you some definition as a human being. And you'll feel better about yourself--I promise. Won't even have to take a pill for it.

What gets extremely old in America is striking up an adult conversation and getting no opinions from anyone. I'll take Johnny-know-it-all's misguided opinion over an incredulous look of embarrassed pride any day. This is the look of the adamantly ignorant. A look that says, "I work for a living. I don't have time to know things unrelated to the inventory of my store." I'm sorry friend, but life is short, and your store interests no one but yourself. You're going to have to bring a book to bed tonight if you want anyone's genuine respect. Ego-tripping doesn't count as success. Only in your own head. I write this not to patronize, but to encourage. There are many difficult books with boring plot twists (because they mirror real life) that will teach you something significant about being human. Find them. Read them. There are places that you can visit that will remind you what the word "culture" means. Visit them. There is music and food and drinks that will add texture and richness to your time on the planet. You are not a money-making machine. You're a human. Simplify your life and reallocate your funds. There is beauty in the world beyond the concrete, neon signs, and flashing screens, but you have to make an effort to see it. You don't have to wait until retirement to start living your life. By then you'll be too apathetic to know what you want to do anyway. You'll probably just work to avoid the boredom. I'm not saying don't work--we all need money to be well--I'm saying do these things too. Don't just come home and collapse as it is in our nature to do.