I Can't Know

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A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear Friend,

Anyone who has ever known a baby will attest that it’s miraculous – really, I can’t think of another word for it – to watch a human being slowly acquire language. I mostly think humans are kind of sucky animals; or, at least, we have collectively done some of the stupidest, most destructive things with a unique and magical type of consciousness.

But language is an area where I can only marvel. Of course, we are not the only animals with language; but it does seem like we possess the most flexible and compositional communication system in the animal kingdom, and how could you not think that that was pretty cool?

A lot of people learn language one word at a time: more; cat; mama; no. They learn that individual words are useful, and then they come to string words together, and wow is that ever a powerful thing to be able to do. It’s like when you are given six individual Legos, and you start to realize that there are actually infinite Legos, and with this kind of Lego supply, infinite blueprints for buildings.

Other people learn gestalts instead of words. A gestalt is a multi-word phrase that is learned as a single unit. People who are gestalt language learners don’t start with individual blocks; they start with block chunks. Block chunks are cool because they are bigger, but they can also be frustrating if that’s all you’ve got to work with. Sometimes you can’t build exactly the thing you want because the block chunks can’t combine to make it.

My daughter is a gestalt language learner, and every year, I’ve kept lists of her gestalts, because they are honestly amazing. What makes a person attach to one word cluster over another? Scientists aren’t totally sure, though it’s believed that it has to do with emotion — the way a turn-of-phrase made the person feel.

Here are a few of her early gestalts:

• Ready, steady, go

• Oopsie doodles

• Hi, my name is T. I am a [insert “ice princess” “dragon” or “Muppet Baby”].

• Look at all of these friends

• Can you see my blood? (Pronounced “blud” and in the tone of a vampire.)

• I have a love

• That was opic (this is from Frozen 2, where the girls say that something was epic. I appreciate this new word)

But my favorite, and the one that everyone in our house has adopted, is, “I can’t know.” She used to say it a lot, and often, it’s unintentionally profound. The distance between “don’t” and “can’t” is vast. I’m not positive where she got this phrase, but my best guess is that it came from Defying Gravity, where Elphaba sings, “I don’t want it – no – I can’t want it anymore.” I think T originally said, “I can’t want that” when she was offered a gross-to-her food (pretty much all food counts in this category), and then took the “I can’t” and reapplied it to the phrase “I don’t know.”

It’s amazing how much we believe we know. We’re very arrogant about it. In reality, the scope of what we can know is narrow; particularly tricky, perhaps, is not being able to know the future. It’s frustrating to have this magical consciousness that’s able to conceptualize a future without having any sure information about what it will contain. Similarly frustrating is trying to understand the past, and so people tend to oversimplify it. What we see is always only a tiny fraction of what there is to see (not to mention what is completely unseeable). Is it more comfortable to believe we know more than we can? Might there be some ease in releasing our chokehold on the idea that ANYTHING is knowable?

For most of my life, I wanted to be a journalist. I can remember being a high school activist reading about the importance of a free press in a truly free society, and subscribing to that idea hook, line, and sinker. The concept of truth, then, was compelling. I was psyched about the idea of lifting up the voices of people who were silenced by systems of oppression. I became editor-in-chief of my college newspaper, and got an internship at The Nation Magazine.

And then, because the job market was terrible when I graduated college (Thanks, Great Recession!), I took a job as a Teach for America teacher, believing I would teach for two years and then find a journalism job or go to journalism school. But in that job, I was told a lot of things were true that ended up not being true. I ran around, trying to pin down the truth, but it was slippery. Was I doing something noble and good by being a special education teacher in New Orleans; or was it actually evil and naive? (Neither, probably.) I lost confidence in my beliefs, because the quality of the story I was able to tell myself about what I could see had deteriorated.

I was told that there was a shortage of educators in New Orleans post-Katrina. In fact, roughly 4,500 teachers, mostly Black and brown women, had been fired without cause in the wake of the disaster. I worked with hundreds of people in my time as an educator in New Orleans. Some openly hated me and told me that I shouldn’t be there. Others were gracious and effusive and invited me over during Mardi Gras for king cake baked in their own ovens; they urged me not to leave. I could find no patterns. Every day there was a new contradiction. Two years turned into nearly ten, and in the end, I felt further from the truth than ever.

But I’m glad. I went to New Orleans a person who could know. I left a person who couldn’t know. It feels much better in my bones to be the latter.

People reliably overestimate what they know. This tendency is data-backed, and is colloquially known as the better-than-average effect; it holds across multiple disciplines. This effect says that people generally tend to rate their abilities, attributes, and personality traits as better than average. Meanwhile, the similar-but-sort-of-different Dunning-Kruger effect is the cognitive bias describing the systemic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of their abilities in that area. Neither bodes particularly well for humanity on the whole.

As my daughter gets older, she uses fewer gestalts, finding more exacting language to tell us what she needs us to understand. We’ve noticed “I can’t know” has been replaced recently by “I don’t know.” But I want “I can’t know” to live on, as a kind of a mantra. Most of the time, is there anything truer?

Obviously, we are living in an era where a lot of people have given up on truth, choosing instead to form beliefs based on feelings. I want to be clear that right now, good journalism — effortful truth-telling — is more important than it’s ever been in my lifetime. As Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.” The most important question I ask my students these days is, “How do you know?” Make sure you’re asking yourself the same thing; even when your beliefs feel iron-clad. For the most part, truth is not a feeling. On the other hand, though, all feelings are true.

I am not the kind of journalist I thought I was going to be. I couldn’t know. But on this path, I’ve had the great pleasure of learning how to use language in other ways; how to wrap it around my own heart and squeeze out the dark parts near the bottom. I learned how to write to you. Language is at its best when it is doing the work of connection; and it can do that in more than one way. There are plenty of paths between here and there.

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Loose Thoughts

I wrote the meat of this post on a plane going to Portland for a short visit in honor of my sister Alexis’s birthday; now I’m on the plane flying home. I’m trying to think about what to write about Alexis; every year it’s a struggle, as she is a complex person and I do kind of get the sense (because she’s told me with words) that she often distrusts compliments, maybe especially public ones. So here are the things that are coming to mind in this moment: I like that she is unafraid to fart in front of people; I like how kindly she talks to her children; I like when something funny happens and you look over at her and she’s laughing — this big, gentle, collapsing kind of laugh that diffuses any tension. She dresses really cool, and I feel like that’s always been true; she knows the good brands before anyone else I know knows them. Some yoga teachers, during long stretchy parts of the flow, will come over to you and rub their hands together and sort of rub you and pull on you in a way that feels good, like a massage — and maybe it is because she is my sister, but I like the way Alexis does this the best of anyone. (Alexis is a yoga teacher.) She is very generous. Our emotional work in Being Sisters has been singularly challenging and rewarding for me, and I trust that it feels like that for her, too. Happy birthday, my brilliant and gracious sister.

• Alexis got us both tattoos: these beautiful peacocks from a tattoo artist named Ian who goes by Gadzoox Portland. He said he is seeking clients, which feels kind of shocking because his work it terribly beautiful and he is Internet successful, so far as I can tell. If you’re in Portland looking for a tattoo, he is easy to book with, affordable, pleasant, and incredibly talented.

  

• It had been a while since I’ve gotten a tattoo. Do you have any tattoos? Tell me what you think about tattoos; tell me about some of yours or all of them or a few of them.

• At dinner the other night (honestly, it was a few weeks ago), Jess asked the dinner table if Timothee Chalamet is the next Leonardo DiCaprio — a Leading Man type of Movie Star the likes of which we haven’t so far really witnessed in this generation. I have since repeated this question to many, many people. Responses are generally intense and immediate — but utterly split. Your take?

• What drink do you order on a plane? Does anyone order something that is NOT ginger ale, Diet Coke, or sparkling water?

• There have been phases of my life where I’ve felt a lot of inspiration about What To Post on Instagram, which is a huge part of my livelihood. I have not felt super sure about it in over a year now.

• Many people took to the comments section of last week’s newsletter to swear by Darn Tough socks, which my husband already knew about and agreed were the gold standard and nothing else is nearly as good. I will order myself one pair of these when I am out of credit card debt.

• Does anyone remember Nickelodeon Magazine? It was my favorite magazine; maybe I’ll get a few copies of it from Ebay. I am remembering reading about an ice hotel in there, like 20 years ago. It still feels quite modern to me, an ice hotel. I have a lot of very old magazines I’ve purchased from Ebay and I sometimes daydream about scanning them and writing a whole newsletter about them. I can’t quite figure out what my angle would be, but an old periodical is always interesting. Luke found bunches of old newspapers in the walls when he started knocking down stuff in our kitchen. I liked the old funny pages; and a crossword puzzle that someone had completed.

• In the comments last week, Kitty said, “Everyone is either here for birds, polyamory, or parenting. You know those three are what we expect and it’s cool to own it.” Is this right?

• I am traveling without T, and have appreciated spending time with my sister’s three kids, who are all such strong personalities. Do you find yourself saying, “I love that age” about a certain Age of Child? For me, it’s seven.