the fun (and danger) of ignorance.

Hey, as the country, I know America loves caffeine, but I think ignorance is our very favorite drug. It's self-replenishing. You don't have to farm it. Nobody's going to bust you. It lets you sleep at night and it is completely illegal. If knowing is power, then not knowing is peace. We've built an entire civilization on getting that peace and getting the most out of it. And that is just a little part of life. Nobody can know about everything, but lately the bubble that the average person lives in seems a little bit stretched out. Maybe our collective ignorance has gone from necessity for a complex society to a charming coping mechanism to a really big structural flaw in the way that we handle things as a society. So let's explore this a little bit and talk about not knowing.

And we all do this a little bit when you have that first bite of processed cheese, that moment between spending money with a credit card and getting the bill, just the denial anytime you're in a situation and you think things aren't that bad. This isn't a bug. It's a feature. Psychologists even have a name for it and it's called information avoidance. In a 2017 study published by Nature Human Behavior, researchers found people were willing to pay real money to avoid hearing bad news about their money or their health. We are so worried about reality, especially when it's something that we can't do anything about, that we will bribe ourselves a little bit. We are willing to pay to stay uninformed.

Now the problem with that kind of thinking is that there is a large system around you that is counting on you to be dumb. And anything that you're dumb about gets exploited. Corporate America loves ignorance and it is baked into a lot of our day-to-day actions where our ignorance is taken advantage of. When you don't read ingredients, when you skip terms of service, it comes back and it bites you.

Let's look at Norfolk Southern for a minute. This is the company responsible for the 2023 chemical derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. They handed out $1,000 checks to the folks in that town. The folks living there were told their water and air was all good. Then the independent investigators brought their own equipment and they found toxic readings off the charts. This should not shock you in America. The truth costs extra in this country. Meanwhile, take your eyes and look at Jackson, Mississippi. A real water crisis chugged along there while the state officials served up these very vague, passive-aggressive comments while the people were going without clean water in that city.

And of course, the situation between Jackson and the state of Mississippi is long and complex, but ignorance scales upwards. It's a little bit okay for you to be ignorant as an individual. It's a little worse for a city to be held in ignorance, and it's worse when it scales even further up. Ignorance can be something that protects your peace of mind at first, but when it comes into a group, it can be corrosive. If you've never learned to swim, that beach is paradise until a tide comes in and hits you hard. Think about those people that didn't know their TikTok data was going to China. Think about those people that didn't know their water was flammable until it caught fire in the middle of their shower like in Flint.

When you don't know something, it creates a slow disaster, and it delays the ability to fix that problem until you are living in a world of damage control. Now, when I talk about all this stuff, I am definitely not saying that we need to do more doom-scrolling in life. I'm really more saying that bragging about not paying attention to the news is not really great as a humble brag anymore in these times. You don't have to know everything, and I don't really think having news brain is good for anybody, but I do think there is an aspect of the life going on around you that you should pay attention to.

Pick a lane and get in there. Care about the climate. Care about elections. Care about your landlord. Care about your job, national, local, something. Make an interest and be smarter about it than the average person. Ignorance can be cozy, it can feel good, but the consequences of ignorance tend to vote. They tend to leak. They tend to go viral, and when that hits you, there's not an easy refund to be had. Ignorance used to be bliss, but now it is costly. It's costing more just like everything else in this world because it's better to blow your afternoon now than to have your life blown up behind it.