When you’re young, not knowing something can feel like a weakness. It’s more than just missing facts—sometimes it’s just admitting you’re a little lost, or not sure you can pull something off. Saying “I don’t know” can feel like you’ve dropped the ball, and folks often see it the same way.
When you’re young, it feels like the world expects you to be sure of everything. You’re supposed to have answers or at least act as if you do. Schools hand out gold stars for quick, sharp answers.
Early jobs want you to look eager and ready for anything. Even just being curious can feel risky. Asking too many questions can make you look as if you’re over your head.
Take too long to answer, and it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing. Stay quiet, and people might think you’ve struck out.
So you learn, early on, to mask uncertainty by bluffing and nodding along. You speak with more confidence than you feel.
You learn the art of sounding capable, even when you’re not. The cost of admitting ignorance is too high.
The irony with youth is that ignorance is most natural and forgivable. No one has lived long enough to know much of anything yet.
And yet youth is when ignorance gets least tolerated. The runway is short, the expectations are loud, and you’re supposed to be becoming something, and becoming requires momentum and mistakes.
Age changes that calculus.
Somewhere along the way, often much later than you expect, the admission of not knowing stops being a liability and starts being read as wisdom. The same sentence that once closed doors begins to open them.
“I don’t know,” spoken by a young person, can sound like a shrug. Said by an older person, especially one who is retired, it can sound like restraint, discernment, and hard-earned humility.
The older person who says, “I’m not sure about that,” isn’t assumed to be uninformed. They’re supposed to be careful.
Retirement sharpens the shift. When you are no longer climbing, competing, or proving your worth through productivity, the pressure to perform evaporates.
You’re no longer auditioning. You’ve already lived the part.
A retired person can say, “I don’t understand this new technology,” and it comes across as a gentle commentary on the world’s speed, not a personal failing. It’s received as wisdom about priorities, not a confession of weakness.
Even confusion, when voiced by someone older, is often treated as insight: a reminder that not everything new is obvious, necessary, or better. What changes isn’t just how others hear it, but how it feels to say it.
With time, you realize that not knowing ain’t a gap but a condition to manage. You learn that certainty is overrated, and that most of the damage in the world comes not from ignorance but from false confidence.
You’ve seen enough plans fail, enough experts be wrong, enough sure things unravel to understand that humility isn’t self-protection, it’s accuracy. There is a power in being able to say, without apology, “That’s beyond me,” or “I don’t have an answer for that,” or “I’ve learned not to rush to judgment.”
These are not statements of retreat, but markers of distance traveled. Unfortunately, this kind of wisdom is rarely accepted when it’s most needed.
The young must pretend to know, while the old are free to admit they don’t. Perhaps we shouldn’t spend the first half of our lives proving our competence, and the second half learning when not to.
Somewhere in between, if we’re fortunate, we discover that not knowing, spoken plainly, honestly, and without fear, was never the problem.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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