The Sh#% Your Parents Should Tell You

It's Okay to Not Know

It's okay to not know.

When we enter high school, people (adults in particular) start asking you a lot of questions.

What are you interested in?

What college do you want to go to?

What subject do you want to study?

What do you plan to do after you graduate?

What kind of job do you want?

What are you doing to prepare for or advance your career?

Why are you getting so pissy? It's a simple question.

They ask as if, at the tender age of 16 or 18 or 35, you should have a clear, solid answer to those questions. But at the tender age of 16 or 18 or 35, you may not. You may find yourself too overwhelmed with the expectations these very same adults have heaped upon you. You may find that the world has been upended by some catastrophe unforeseen (as most catastrophes are). You may find yourself lacking the knowledge or guidance you need to help you figure out what it is you truly can and want to do. You may simply have not had the time or mental bandwidth to sort these sorts of things out.

Consequently, you may not know how to answer these questions. That's okay. When someone asks you a question for which you have no clear, solid answer (whether it's one of these or simply "What do you want for dinner?"), a totally acceptable and perfectly valid answer is

"I don't know."

You see, the world is vast and varied, and so are you. You can't explore, much less understand, the planet in a handful of years. Likewise, it takes heaps of time, mounds of patience, and more than a dozen moments of self-reflection to come up with answers to life's bigger questions. Most of the time, those answers are partial or tentative (or both) at best. That's because this vast, varied world is constantly changing, growing, moving toward an unknowable future. The same is true for the vast, varied you.

Many (too many) people may find "I don't know" to be an unsatisfying answer. They may push you to come up with something more definitive and familiar. This is because many (too many) of us don't deal well with uncertainty. Not knowing makes us feel lost and weak and stupid. Knowing makes us feel certain, and certainty makes us feel safe and secure, confident even. But, certainty also ends our conversation with the universe.

"I don't know" may feel like a wobbly answer, but it's actually an open one. "I don't know" welcomes inquiry, it encourages exploration. It makes us malleable rather than rigid in the face of change. And that primes us to understand more than we ever imagined.

So, if you're the tender age of 16, 18, or even 55 and you don't have all the answers, that's okay. It's more than okay.

"I don't know" is one of the wisest and bravest things you can say.