In May, I walked across the stage in Zellerbach Hall, symbolizing the completion of four years at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. Strangely, what I remember most about those fleeting moments is being inexplicably and overly concerned about whether my feet were on the mark when I was photographed. But I also remember the keynote address delivered by a distinguished professor emeritus of the college. I can gather only fragments of his speech, as if recollections from a dream, but I do vividly remember how I felt. As I watched the man whose books and articles had filled reading lists from my first lower-division course to graduate seminars, his head bobbing and his fingers emphatically punctuating the air, I felt inspired, content and proud to be part of Berkeley’s community.
But I also felt overwhelmed. Overwhelmed at how much I don’t know. At the realization that for every book I’ve read, there are hundreds more on the topic. For every building I’ve studied, there are thousands more I haven’t heard of. Like my high school biology teacher said, we are surrounded by a sea of knowledge and can only manage to scoop up a thimbleful. And for many of us who are graduating, that is more than a little intimidating.
It’s intimidating because of the premium our society puts on knowledge. Our whole lives are devoted to obtaining it. Even as I write this, I am procrastinating on studying hundreds of words that I will never actually use for a standardized test that will hopefully lead me to institutions where I can attain more knowledge. College is all about acquiring knowledge — taking copious notes, poring over textbooks, conducting research and joining organizations — hoping that each day, we’ll know something we didn’t know the day before. And suddenly, after four or maybe five years of this frantic pursuit, we suddenly don’t know. We might have no idea where we will be living a month or even a week from now. We see our futures on a split screen, playing out one of three or four different ways. We aren’t sure who we’ll meet or even who we will become. The opportunities are endless, but we just don’t know.
Today at Berkeley, we are fortunate to have almost instant access to knowledge and information, which are literally at our fingertips. A swipe of the finger tells us what our friends are eating this very second, and another gives us access to nearly every library in the world. This ability to know is quickly translated into the need to know — the anxiety that it’s not acceptable not to know. And it’s not just the need to know things external to us but also the need to know the things within. The emphasis on knowing who we are, on somehow “finding” ourselves, is so great as we transition into the working world. I’m told that knowing how to do things, knowing what I want and knowing how to get it will supposedly land me a successful career. Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am,” but today, we tend to believe that all thinking is a means to an end. “I know, therefore I am” might be our battle cry.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t some perversely anachronistic, anti-academic rant emerging from one of the world’s top institutions. Knowledge certainly is power, and we should aim, both as individuals and as a society, toward its advancement. But in a place as brilliant and competitive as Berkeley, I think it’s easy to forget that just because we haven’t all founded startups or been published in Nature (and even if we have), it’s perfectly fine to say “I don’t know.” Not just “I don’t know my graduate school plans” or “I don’t know about his or her business,” but “I don’t know what I’m doing this summer” and “I don’t know the difference between retirement plans.” We are so accustomed to memorizing organic compounds and taking philosophical stances that we are flustered when we suddenly don’t have all the answers to the prosaic aspects of the “real world.”
So this is not a wish to abandon knowledge but a reassurance, as much to myself as to others, that we can and should guiltlessly think without knowing. Dream without knowing. Explore without knowing. And accept and know that we don’t know. The unknown is as powerful as it is scary. But as Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “Once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.” We are young. We have time to figure things out. For now, let’s embrace the unfamiliar expanse before us and unabashedly face the terror.
Preeti Talwai is a recent UC Berkeley graduate.