Ever lay awake at 3:00 AM wondering what your dog is actually dreaming about when his paws start twitching? Or maybe you've stared at a dusty old family photo of a great-aunt you never met, wishing you could ask her what she was laughing at when the shutter clicked. It’s a weird, itchy feeling. We live in an era where Google can tell us the exact temperature in Tokyo or the chemical composition of a Mars rock in three seconds flat. Yet, there’s this massive, silent pile of some things I'll never know that haunts the corners of our daily lives.
It’s honestly kind of humbling.
We’ve mapped the human genome, sure. But I can't tell you what it feels like to be a bat, and neither can the world’s leading neurologists. Thomas Nagel, a philosopher who basically became famous for asking that exact question in 1974, argued that even if we knew every single firing neuron in a bat's brain, we’d still be missing the "is-ness" of the experience. The subjective reality. This gap between data and experience is where most of our frustration—and our wonder—actually lives.
The Digital Void and Lost Data
We think the internet is forever. It isn't.
Vint Cerf, one of the actual fathers of the internet, has been sounding the alarm about a "Digital Dark Age" for years. He’s worried that as software and hardware evolve, our old files will become totally unreadable. Think about it. You might have a hard drive from 2005 sitting in a drawer. If you don't have the right IDE-to-USB adapter and the specific legacy software to open those proprietary photo formats, those memories are effectively gone. They become some things I'll never know because the key to the lock was thrown away by a Silicon Valley update.
It's not just personal stuff either.
Take the "Lost Library of Herculaneum." When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it didn't just bury Pompeii; it carbonized a massive library of papyrus scrolls. For centuries, they were just charred lumps. Now, scientists are using X-ray phase-contrast tomography and AI to try and read them without unrolling them (because they’d crumble into dust). But even with the best tech, large chunks of those texts are just... erased. Burnt. We might recover a few lines of Epicurean philosophy, but the vast majority of that specific human thought is a permanent blank.
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The Brain’s Weird Obsession with the Unknowable
Why do we care?
Basically, our brains are hardwired for "closure." Psychologists call it the Need for Cognitive Closure (NFCC). When we hit a wall where information should be but isn't, our amygdala gets a little stressed out. We want the full story. We want the ending.
Research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that curiosity follows a "U-shaped" curve. We aren't that curious about things we know nothing about, and we aren't curious about things we already understand. We are most obsessed with the "information gap"—that tantalizing space where we know just enough to realize there’s a secret we’re missing.
That’s why true crime is so massive. Or why people still argue about who the Zodiac Killer was. It’s not just the macabre details; it’s the itch of the unfinished.
Secrets of the Deep and the Far
Then there's the physical world.
We have better maps of the surface of the Moon than we do of our own ocean floor. That’s a cliché because it’s true. The Hadal zone—the deepest parts of the ocean, deeper than 6,000 meters—is a place of crushing pressure and total darkness. We’ve sent people to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but that’s like looking at a dark forest with a tiny flashlight for five minutes and claiming you "know" the forest.
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The biodiversity down there is a black box.
Every time a ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) goes down, it finds something that looks like it was designed by a committee of aliens. There are species that will live and die in those trenches without ever being named. To me, that’s one of the most profound versions of some things I'll never know. Entire ecosystems, complex social behaviors of deep-sea cephalopods, and chemical languages we can’t even detect are happening right now, miles beneath our feet, in total silence.
Why Some Secrets Stay Buried
- The Observer Effect: In quantum mechanics, specifically the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you literally cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. The act of measuring one changes the other. Nature has a "No Entry" sign built into the physics of reality.
- The "Great Library" Problem: History is written by the winners, but more often, it’s written by the survivors. We don't know what the common person in 14th-century Mesoamerica thought about their gods because their records were systematically destroyed or decayed.
- Biological Limits: Our eyes only see a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. We’re blind to infrared and ultraviolet. We are walking through a world of "hidden" colors and signals that bees and snakes see clearly.
The Internal Unknown: Your Own Mind
This is the one that really gets people.
You’ve probably had a "gut feeling" that turned out to be right. Where did it come from?
Neuroscience tells us that our subconscious processes about 11 million bits of information per second, while our conscious mind handles maybe 40 to 50 bits. Most of "you" is running in the background. You’ll never truly know the full chain of logic that led your brain to decide you didn't trust that stranger or why you suddenly remembered the lyrics to a jingle from 1994.
We are strangers to ourselves.
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The philosopher Socrates famously said the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing. It sounds like a deep quote for a coffee mug, but it’s actually a pretty solid survival strategy. Accepting that there are some things I'll never know actually makes you a better thinker. It prevents "contemptuous certainty," which is basically the death of intelligence.
Dealing with the Information Gap
So, what do you do with the frustration?
Instead of spiraling about the "void," experts suggest leaning into the "Awe" factor. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at Berkeley and author of Awe, found that experiencing the vastness of the unknown actually reduces stress and makes people more prosocial. When you realize how much you don't know, your ego shrinks. You realize you’re part of a much larger, weirder, more complex tapestry.
It’s okay that the Voynich Manuscript hasn't been fully decoded. It’s okay that we don't know what happened before the Big Bang—or if "before" is even a valid concept when time itself hadn't started.
Actionable Ways to Embrace the Unknown
- Audit your "Digital Legacy": If there are things you want people to know after you’re gone, print them. Paper lasts 500 years; a cloud subscription lasts until your credit card expires.
- Practice Intellectual Humility: Next time you're certain about a complex topic (politics, science, or why your neighbor is acting weird), pause. List three variables you might be missing.
- Document the "Small Things": You can’t know everything, but you can bridge the gap for the next generation. Write down the stuff Google won't know: how your grandmother’s kitchen smelled or why you chose your first car.
- Explore "Dark Data": Look into projects like the Ocean Census, which aims to discover 100,000 new species in the next decade. Support the people trying to shrink the pile of unknowns.
The reality is that some things I'll never know isn't a failure of science or a personal shortcoming. It’s just the nature of being a finite creature in an infinite universe. There’s a certain peace in letting the mystery be. You don't need to solve the world to live in it.
Stop trying to archive every moment. Stop trying to find the "hidden meaning" in every coincidence. Sometimes, the most honest answer to the biggest questions in life is just a shrug and a smile. That's not giving up; it's just being honest about the view from where we're standing.
To get comfortable with the unknown, start by identifying one area of your life where you've been demanding absolute certainty—whether it's your career path or a relationship's future—and consciously decide to "sit with the mystery" for one week. Notice if your anxiety levels drop when you stop trying to predict the unpredictable. Check your old digital storage devices once a year to ensure your "knowable" history hasn't turned into unreadable bit-rot. Support open-source archiving projects like the Internet Archive to help preserve the collective "we" against the Digital Dark Age.