Know/Knew

/nō/ – /n(y)o͞o/

verb / past tense

1.to be aware of through observation, inquiry, or information.

Know- a simple enough word, but a commonly misused concept. “I knew that would happen!” “I knew he would cheat on her.” blah blah blah – sure you knew. Your profession is palmistry after all—

It’s funny but everything circles back to language (or maybe I’m biased… eh).

The problem is that the concept of ‘knowing’ is often misused in contexts where events and circumstances can’t be shown or proven to be true (aka the past). This leads us to believe that we understand the past, implying that the future should also be knowable.* But neither beliefs are true. We didn’t ‘know that would happen’- in hindsight we identified a pattern that led to a conclusion- that’s all. Implying that we ‘knew something would happen’ after it has happened is no better than gambling that ‘something is going to happen tomorrow’. Language is a devilish vixen; in order to think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.*

So sweetheart- be careful… you don’t know if anything bad is going to happen tomorrow, but I bet if you didn’t take anything away from this, you’ll justify your narrative in hindsight to believe you did.

My inspiration to synthesize this peice came from my reading of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and spending too much time in bed not being able to fall asleep.

*Quotes from page 201-202