The road curves out ahead of us, the trees pulling long shadows across the asphalt. I’m driving—my dad in the passenger seat, one arm out the window, tapping his fingers on the door in rhythm with the song on the radio. The Stones are playing low, something from “Sticky Fingers” I only ever seem to hear when I’m with him. The air coming in smells like salt and cut grass.
We’re heading to Rhode Island, winding through the backroads we’ve driven a hundred times before—at least, he has. The sun is starting to set, casting an orange glow across the trees and windshield. We haven’t said much for a few minutes.
Then, casually, he nods toward the windshield and says, “Take a left on Mitchells Ln.”
I pause for a second. “Where’s that?”
He shoots me a look, somewhere between amused and confused. “Are you serious? It’s the road right by the golf course—you’ve driven down it a million times.”
I just shrug. “I don’t know… I always just use Maps.”
He lets out a short laugh. “You really don’t know the roads around here, do you?” He shakes his head, not mad, just baffled. “We didn’t have GPS when I was your age. You just figured it out.”
I don’t really have a response, so I just keep driving.
He’s right. Without my phone pulling up step-by-step directions, I probably couldn’t get from one side of town to the other. My dad doesn’t have that problem—he just knows the way. It’s instinctive. The roads live in his memory like a second language. I, on the other hand, rely on tech to think for me. The landscape doesn’t feel familiar. It feels outsourced. It exists not as a place, but as a set of coordinates I retrieve on command—a blue arrow on a screen.
Watching my dad navigate without hesitation made me realize how often I treat other parts of my life like unfamiliar roads—just waiting for the next alert to tell me what to do. It’s not just directions I outsource. I rely on being “in the know” the same way: as a kind of emotional GPS. Staying updated—on news, trends, group chats—feels like a way to avoid getting lost. Most of the time, it isn’t even real curiosity. It’s about not falling behind. About proving I haven’t missed anything.
It’s weird how much modern life makes not knowing feel like a personal failure. Everyone’s constantly trying to prove they’re in the loop—throwing out half-baked takes, name-dropping headlines, pretending they’ve read things they’ve only scrolled past. This so-called “awareness” is performative, and the performance isn’t just about fitting in—it’s about convincing yourself that you know more than you do. And the scary part is, most of us believe our own performance. The confidence is real. The knowledge often isn’t.
That’s what catches me off guard about the way my dad moves through the world. He doesn’t worry about keeping up or falling behind—he reads widely, thinks carefully, but doesn’t perform. He doesn’t chase the next thing just to prove he’s already there. When he pointed out that I didn’t really know the roads around our home, he wasn’t just referring to directions. Instead, his comment made me realize how much I rely on technology to fill in the gaps. I’m used to outsourcing the details of everyday life because there’s always an app to do it for me.
But I don’t think this anxiety about not knowing is just a personal thing. It feels generational. It’s like we’ve been trained to think that knowledge equates to value. Falling behind doesn’t just mean being out of touch; it feels like missing a step in a dance everyone else already knows. At Harvard, it’s practically a reflex. You walk into a dining hall conversation, and everyone’s already talking about the latest news or some debate blowing up on social media. If you’re not in the loop, you feel like a small failure.
Still, being in the loop doesn’t always mean understanding—it often just means knowing how to sound like you do. At Harvard, people get good at bluffing, speaking in polished sentences that circle around a point they haven’t really thought through. The performance becomes the knowledge.
I check my phone more than I’d like to admit. Five, six hours a day, sometimes seven. I’m not reading news because I’m curious—I’m skimming headlines so I won’t be caught off guard when someone brings them up. I refresh X between classes like I’m checking the scoreboard of a game I forgot I was playing in.
In his 1975 book “Discipline and Punish,” French theorist Michel Foucault argues that modern power doesn’t just punish—it trains you to punish yourself. You don’t need a guard if you’ve already built the tower in your head. That’s what makes self-surveillance so insidious: it doesn’t just regulate what we do—it alters how we see ourselves. The irony is, most people don’t even feel behind. They feel ahead. We’re not just afraid of ignorance—we’ve lost the ability to recognize it in ourselves.
No one’s actually watching me scroll on my phone before section. No one’s giving me a grade for having the right take. But still, I self-correct. I monitor what I know and what I don’t, and I manage the version of myself that other people might see. It’s like life has become a kind of soft surveillance—just enough to keep you always catching up.
It’s exhausting—not because we’re hungry to learn, but because we’re desperate not to fall behind. Half the time, we’re not thinking—we’re scanning, adjusting, posing. We second-guess what we know and overstate what we don’t, all to hold onto the illusion that we’re always in control. That we get it. That we’re already caught up.
But the irony is that the best learning often comes from admitting how much you still don’t know, not pretending to have it all figured out. The people I learn the most from aren’t the ones who speak in polished arguments, but the ones who say, “I don’t know,” and mean it—the ones who ask the awkward questions and speak up even when they’re unsure.
Vulnerability isn’t a weakness—it’s clarity. It’s the thing that makes actual thinking possible. It’s in those moments of uncertainty that you actually start to understand something deeper, whether that be in the classroom or passing conversations with friends.
That’s why not knowing can feel oddly freeing, if you let it be. It means letting go of the instinct of performative understanding, to instantly process every event, every opinion, every update. It’s stepping outside the cycle of needing to appear certain—and accepting that uncertainty is part of being human.
Still, there’s a difference between not knowing and refusing to know. Curiosity begins with humility, with admitting the gap. But ignorance—the dangerous kind—pretends the gap isn’t there. The real problem isn’t that we don’t know everything. It’s when we convince ourselves we already do. That’s the trap: not uncertainty, but certainty without reflection.
I think about that drive again, how my dad didn’t need a map, didn’t hesitate, didn’t second-guess the next turn. He just knew where he was. Not because he memorized every street, but because he paid attention over time.
Meanwhile, I’m so used to being told where to go—by apps, by group chats, by whatever’s trending—that I rarely stop to ask or acknowledge where I actually am. Maybe letting go of the need to always know would leave space for something else. Not certainty and direction, but attention and presence.
My dad doesn’t stress about whether he’s on the most efficient path—he just keeps going, humming along to the radio, reaching forward now and then to turn the dial up when a favorite comes on. Maybe that’s the mindset I need to lean into: not perfect knowledge, but a little more faith that I’ll figure it out as I go. Not knowing doesn’t have to feel like failing. It can be a way of paying attention, of seeing the world as it is instead of always racing to stay ahead of it.
Luke Wagner ’26 (lukewagner@college.harvard.edu) is the Vice President of the Harvard Independent.