The Lost Art Of Not Knowing

There’s something funny about our renewed interest in analog. After years of making just about everything faster and easier, we seem to have developed a soft spot for things that ask us to slow down and figure things out for ourselves. I get the appeal of film cameras and vinyl records, but I wonder if there’s more to it than a fondness for old stuff.

I grew up in a time when we couldn’t look up every answer or check what our friends were doing whenever we felt like it.

We missed things and got things wrong.

We sometimes had to wait to find out what happened, and we had no idea which ordinary moments would turn into the memories we’d carry for years.

What did that kind of not knowing give us, if anything? And could we miss something we never realized we had?

WDKWWDK: We Didn’t Know What We Didn’t Know

Before Google could answer every question, we had to live with a certain amount of uncertainty. We also learned a little patience and believed things that made absolutely no sense.

Remember calling your friend’s house phone and hoping she was home? If she wasn’t, you could try again later. Or you could wait until school and ask what she did yesterday. That was your entire investigative process.

And if her dad answered the phone? You were expected to have a conversation with a grown man before you could speak to your friend.

You had not prepared for this.

You were twelve.

My parents also told me that if I crossed my eyes, they’d get stuck that way. I accepted this information from two adults I trusted, with no fact checking and no second opinion. Imagine the possibilities if I’d had Google. I could have disproved a childhood myth in seconds instead of spending my formative years carefully monitoring my own eyeballs.

We had other challenges. If a school event conflicted with Dawson’s Creek, you had a genuine scheduling crisis. You could try to record it on the VCR, assuming you knew how to program the thing. Otherwise, you missed the episode. The plot moved on without you.

And heaven forbid you accidentally taped over your own First Communion. 

Getting somewhere new required a separate level of faith. MapQuest printed directions that you had to bring with you, then interpret in real time. Miss a turn, and you might have to find a safe place to pull over and figure out where you went wrong. Today, my phone reroutes me before I’ve even finished saying a bad word. What a time to be alive.

Then came AIM, and all of a sudden you could see a whole list of friends online. It felt revolutionary. You could send a message without calling someone’s house and risking another conversation with their dad.

Of course, people used away messages like “out.”

Okay, but where? Out to dinner? Out with friends? Out curing world hunger? Robbing a bank?

We had a new way to connect with everyone and still knew almost nothing about what anyone was doing.

From Documenting Everything To Curating The Evidence That We Have A Life

I am genuinely in awe of how social media has changed.

There was a time when Facebook albums documented practically every event in your life.

You went to the zoo? Eighty pictures.

A birthday party? Another album. A night out?

Forty two photos, including several that looked identical except for the person who blinked.

And we posted them. All of them. Nobody needed a carefully curated selection that captured the essence of the afternoon. We had pictures, and we were going to upload every last one.

Now, six carefully selected pictures with a caption like “Life lately” can represent four months of someone’s life. We went from documenting everything to curating the evidence that we have a life.

I still find that shift fascinating.

We used to have limited glimpses into our friends’ lives. Now we can see the vacation, the dinner, the new haircut, the kids’ milestones, and the carefully framed coffee. We can also follow celebrities we have never met and learn details about their relationships, homes, and daily routines. There is a decent chance I know more about a celebrity I have never met than I know about my own cousin.

How did we get here?

And does knowing so much about someone’s life change what it feels like to catch up with them?

There is a difference between seeing what a friend has been up to online and hearing the whole story from her. One gives you the highlights. The other might include what never made the photo, or something she didn’t know she wanted to tell you until you asked.

Of course, social media can also help us reconnect with people we might otherwise have lost touch with. We can celebrate the big moments and keep up with friends across the country. I love that we can do those things.

I just wonder about the space between what we know and what we don’t. When every little update is available to us, what is left to discover when we finally sit down together?

Then Came The Wonderful Part

For all the questions I have about our access to information, I’m not about to pretend that life was better when we had to work harder to find things out. I like having directions on my phone. I like the ability to identify a song before the chorus ends. If I have a question, I can usually find an answer before I forget what I wanted to know.

The internet has made a remarkable amount of information available to people who might never have had access to it before. It has helped old friends find each other again. It has made learning possible from just about anywhere.

I’m not interested in giving any of that up.

But sometimes I wonder if the process of finding something out mattered, too.

My best friend and I used to record songs off the radio onto cassette tapes. If we couldn’t figure out the lyrics, we rewound the tape and listened again. Then we fast-forwarded, rewound, and tried to work out what the singer was actually saying. We didn’t have a lyric search at our disposal. We had each other, a cassette player, and the hope of figuring out those lyrics. 

I don’t remember that experience because of its inconvenience.

I remember doing it with her.

I think about that when I consider how much easier it is to learn something now. If I want to know how to do something, I can watch a tutorial in my living room. That is a wonderful option.

But in the past, I might have taken a class or asked someone for help. I might have met a person I never would have encountered otherwise or learned valuable information from a friend. The answer was the point, but the trip toward it could lead somewhere unexpected.

Of course, that didn’t happen every time. Plenty of old-fashioned inconveniences were just inconvenient. The frustrating parts can stay in the past.

Still, I wonder how many little connections came from things we couldn’t do alone, questions we had to ask another person, or answers that took a little longer to find.

We couldn’t have known which of those moments would matter later. We were just living our lives.

The Shoebox

I have a shoebox of developed photos in my closet.

I haven’t touched it in years, but I know it’s there.

I could pull up a photo from January 2015 on my phone right now. Boom. Found it. My phone holds years of pictures, and I can search for exactly what I want. That’s pretty incredible, and I wouldn’t trade that convenience for the world.

But imagine going into a shoebox you haven’t opened in three years to find a photo from 2002. You have no idea what else you’ll come across along the way.

Maybe there’s a terrible haircut.

Maybe you’ll find a photo of a friend you haven’t seen in ages.

Maybe you’ll stumble upon a picture from an ordinary night that turns out to be a memory you hadn’t thought about in years.

You went looking for one thing and accidentally rediscovered five others.

That is what I love about the shoebox. It is a real box full of real photographs, but it also feels like a little archive of things I could never have thought to search for. I can look for a particular picture on my phone because I know what I want. I can open the shoebox and discover something I didn’t know I’d forgotten.

You can’t search for a memory you don’t know you have.

And that is part of what makes the shoebox feel different. It holds pieces of a life that I never could have organized in advance, because I couldn’t have known which ordinary moments would become worth keeping.

The box has its own surprises. I don’t get to choose what comes up first.

A Little Room For The Unknown

I keep coming back to those little gaps.

The friend who wasn’t home.

The song we couldn’t identify.

The AIM message that told us absolutely nothing.

At the time, those were ordinary parts of life. We didn’t know we’d ever miss them. But, maybe there’s some hidden (and even special) in the space that used to exist between a question and its answer.

I don’t know that we have lost anything we need to get back. I like the convenience of my phone. I like being able to find people and information that once would have been out of reach.

But I also like the idea that not every detail of life needs to be available the second I wonder about it.

I do know that I sometimes miss the surprise of finding out something by accident.

The kind of discovery you couldn’t search for because you didn’t know it was there.

One of these days, I’ll go looking for a particular photo in that shoebox and end up on the floor, laughing at an outfit I thought was a good idea or remembering a friend I haven’t thought about in years. I won’t know what I’ll find until I open it.

And I think there’s something lovely about that.

So I’m curious: what do you think you’d find if you opened your own shoebox?