Ignorance is not bliss

In the summer of 1742, Thomas Gray lost his closest friend, Richard West, to tuberculosis. The young poet was staying at Stoke Poges, not far from Eton College, where the two of them had become friends as schoolboys. Looking out towards the college in his grief, Gray remembered the carefree days of his own childhood.

In his poem Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, he pictures young boys at play, unaware of the harsh realities awaiting them in adult life, the sorrow, the frustration, the illness and old age that come to all of us eventually. It's an innocence he longs to return to.

“To each his sufferings: all are men,

Condemned alike to groan;

The tender for another's pain,

The unfeeling for his own.

Yet ah! why should they know their fate?

Since sorrow never comes too late,

And happiness too swiftly flies.

Thought would destroy their paradise.

No more; where ignorance is bliss,

'Tis folly to be wise.”

Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (final stanza)

Gray concludes that the boys are better left in ignorance. They will meet that suffering soon enough, and telling them now would only cut short the innocent happiness he himself had lost.

Coming from a man in mourning, it's an understandable sentiment, and it explains why the line is so specific. When he wrote where ignorance is bliss, he was describing a situation where the outcome couldn't be changed, so knowing would only bring the suffering forward.

But in the centuries since, the phrase ignorance is bliss has taken on a life of its own. What survives is a light, almost affectionate saying, a shrug that means what you don't know can't hurt you. And because it sounds wise, we parrot it without ever stopping to question it.

But I don't think it's as wise as it sounds, either in the way we use it today or, perhaps more surprisingly, in the way Gray originally meant it.

Reality doesn't care

The modern version of the phrase contains a hidden assumption, that not knowing about something means we aren't affected by it. If we don't know, the reasoning goes, we're spared the stress of dealing with it.

But this is flawed reasoning because not knowing doesn't stop reality from unfolding. We keep making decisions and taking actions regardless. Every day, we decide how to spend our finite life resources, our time, our money, and our mental and physical resourceThe function of our biological machinery.Full definition (opens in a new tab)→. Those decisions simply get made by whatever misconcepts we already hold by default, and those often contain unexamined assumptions we picked up along the way.

I experienced this with my own finances. In my early twenties, I earned a modest salary and spent it the way most people around me did. I covered the essentials, ate out now and then, and put away some savings each month, assuming that would be enough to retire on by 65. Nothing about it was excessive. It was just the way I knew how to live, and it never occurred to me that there was another way.

That changed when I learned about financial independence, and with it, opportunity costThe lifetime value of the next best alternative forgone when expending life resources to improve or implement misconcepts.Full definition (opens in a new tab)→ and the power of compounding. Every discretionary dollar was a dollar that could have been compounding towards time freedomThe state in which you can sustain your desired consumption level indefinitely without any further input of primary life resources (time, mental resource, and physical resource).Full definition (opens in a new tab)→, the point where I'd no longer need to work to cover my living costs. I'd been making that trade-off all along, without knowing I was making it. Ignorance hides the choice, but it doesn't remove it.

Gray did have a point, though. Knowing made life harder. Spending used to be simple, and now every purchase came with a question attached. My default was still to want the nice thing, so choosing to put that money towards my future instead felt like deprivation for a while.

But the harder decisions were also better ones. Instead of hoping I'd have enough by 65, I reached time freedom at 30. The thirty-five years between them were the opportunity cost of my ignorance, years I'd otherwise have spent working because I had to, rather than because I chose to. I'd been incurring that cost all along without realising. The supposed bliss of not knowing wouldn't have spared me from it. It would only have delayed the moment I found out until much later in life, when I'd have far less time left to do anything about it.

There is an opportunity cost to ignorance, and reality doesn't care whether we know or not. It delivers the outcome either way.

When there's nothing we can do

Gray's original meaning is a different matter. He wasn't advocating for wilful ignorance or staying uninformed. His point boils down to a trade-off between utility and peace of mind. Knowledge has value because it helps us solve problems, make better decisions or change our outcomes. But if an outcome is fixed and inevitable, like future grief, ageing or mortality, knowing about it beforehand doesn't give us the power to change it. It just robs us of present peace.

But within this sentiment lies an assumption that certain outcomes can never be changed, that some problems simply can't be solved. It's a pessimistic worldview.

Physicist and philosopher David Deutsch offers a less fatalistic alternative. He accepts that problems will always arise, but argues that all problems are soluble, as long as solving them doesn't break the laws of physics. That doesn't mean every problem will be solved by us, or within our lifetimes. But believing they are soluble does change our trajectory. If we assume a problem can't be solved, we stop looking, and the belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we assume it can, we keep looking, and sometimes we find the answer. Deutsch calls this rational optimism.

Take the disease that killed Richard West. In 1742, tuberculosis looked like an unchangeable fate. Today, most cases can be cured with a six-month course of antibiotics.

Even our mortality, an outcome we assume is inevitable, is now treated by some as a problem to work on. Today, there are researchers dedicated to understanding ageing and looking for ways to extend how long we stay healthy, as well as how long we live.

Those efforts may not succeed in our lifetimes. But even when an external outcome is beyond our control, knowing about it isn't useless, because some things remain within our control.

One is how we experience what happens to us. Our internal experience is shaped by the misconceptsMisconcepts are the explanations we hold about how the world works, synonymous with mental models but named deliberately to acknowledge their fallibility. Unlike a misconception, a misconcept is not necessarily wrong.Full definition (opens in a new tab)→ we hold, the fallible mental models we use to make sense of the world. Two people can face the same situation and experience it very differently, depending on the explanations they use to interpret it. Gray believed that thought would destroy the boys' paradise. But the damage doesn't come from thought itself. It comes from thought built on poor explanations, the kind that leave us anxious or bitter. The closer our explanations get to reality, the closer our expectations get too, and the less we suffer from the friction between expectation and reality.

The other is the decisions we still get to make, about how we spend our finite life resourcesThe finite resources we expend to improve or implement misconcepts.Full definition (opens in a new tab)→. Take death itself. Knowing that we'll die doesn't change the fact that we will, but it doesn't have to lead to despair. That knowledge can change how we live, prompting us to choose more deliberately how we spend the time we have. Gray was right that happiness too swiftly flies. But knowing this is what helps us appreciate happiness while it lasts.

When to stay ignorant

None of this means we should try to know everything. Karl Popper, the philosopher behind critical rationalism, wrote that "our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite." With finite life resources, we can't possibly learn everything, and acquiring knowledge has an opportunity cost too. What matters is whether our ignorance is deliberate or by default.

Some ignorance is rational. What we need is knowledge that's fit for purpose, enough to make good decisions about the things that matter to us. Choosing not to follow every news cycle, or not to learn the finer details of something with little bearing on our lives, can be a perfectly sensible decision. Which things matter most depends on the goals we've set for ourselves, though for most of us, areas like our finances, our health and our relationships have far greater impact than most others.

When we catch ourselves avoiding something, it's worth asking why. If it's because the lifetime return is low, because there are better uses of our finite life resources, then we're making a deliberate trade-off. If it's because the answer might hurt, then ignorance is acting as a shield, protecting a belief we'd rather not challenge. If we're honest with ourselves, we usually know which one we're doing.

The day we find out

Ignorance can feel like bliss for a long time. The comfort of not knowing is real. But so is the cost, and we're at peace precisely because we can't see it yet. And one day, we find out. Perhaps that moment arrives as a midlife crisis, or as a regret we only face at the very end of our lives.

Looking at reality might cost us some comfort today. But it also gives us the chance to address what we find, and to live more of our remaining time with clarity, rather than inside an illusion that was always going to end.

Ignorance is not bliss. It only postpones the pain, and charges interest in time.