The Freedom to Not Know

I’ve been noticing something in myself lately: I have less tolerance for mistakes than I used to.

When I’m about to explore something new, I immediately want to run to ChatGPT and ask, “Hey, look at what I’m about to do. Is this right? Should I do it another way?” I want to get everything right, even the first time I’m trying.

But I’m beginning to think that this is a bad way of thinking. It reduces our tolerance for mistakes, and that is not really how life works. If you want to learn something, you have to try. You have to be willing to not know.

For instance, I opened the game of Go because I wanted to learn it. My first instinct was to go to ChatGPT and ask for strategies, how to play, what I should be doing. But then I thought, no. That’s not how people have discovered things before. I don’t think that is how the best people learn anything either. They try, they fail, they try again, and through the roughness and frustration, they slowly pick it up.

I saw the same thing when I started getting into Android development. Even when I was simply setting up Android Studio, I kept wanting to run to ChatGPT: “How do I set up the IDE properly?” Which emulator should I download? How should I download it? Instead of just clicking, trying something, and seeing what happens.

Maybe it is laziness of the brain. Or maybe it is just a need for perfection: the need to do things exactly properly from the beginning. But when something is new, of course there will be discomfort. That discomfort does not mean we should run away from it. We should get used to trying, failing, being frustrated, and then eventually getting better.

I’ve also started noticing this in restaurants. Tourists come to Mauritius and sit on their phones asking ChatGPT, “Should I have chop suey with Cantonese rice? Which one would be better for me?” And I understand it. Now we can get an answer that is very specific to us, very quickly.

But in the past, maybe you would just try it. Or ask the waiter and then try it. You have never had it before; you do not need to know every ingredient that goes into it. You can just order it, eat it, and enjoy it—or not enjoy it. That is part of exploring.

Of course, sometimes information helps us avoid something that really does not make sense. AI is useful for that. It gives us quick information and can save us from unnecessary frustration. But when we always need to know first, when we always need the best personalised answer, I think we start losing something.

We lose the spirit of exploration. We lose the ability to go with our gut. We lose the freedom to say, “I don’t know if I’ll like this, but let me see.”

And there is another danger with personalised information. If AI keeps giving you answers based on who you are right now—what you like, what you do, what it thinks suits you—how do you know that is all of you? How do you know there are not other things that would resonate with you, things outside of what you already do, unless you actually explore them?

Maybe we can forget ourselves this way. We can become too fixed on who we think we are, and then receive information that keeps confirming that version of us.

So I think it will always be in our interest to try things anyway. To be comfortable with difficulty. To make mistakes. To touch this and touch that without immediately asking, “What is the right way?”

Because sometimes the right way is not knowing yet.