Ignorance Isn't Bliss

Ignorance isn't bliss.

It only takes one counter-example to prove this statement wrong.

You wouldn't want to be a mindless pig that enjoys its life simply rolling around in mud.

Not convincing? Here's a better example:

Ignorant people who do stupid things as a result are far from "blissful". They're annoying and in some cases dangerous or detrimental to the human race.

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But knowledge isn't necessarily happiness either.

Infact, the more knowledge you have, the less happy you are.

This is game design 101.

This is how stories are written.

Once you know everything about a book, well, it's not immediately fun to read a second time through. You already know everything! Maybe years later once you've forgotten a lot of the story, it can hold value again. When you become ignorant of it again.

Games are designed around ignorance. You don't know what the story is like in the game. You don't know the layout of every level in the game. You don't know what the enemies and bosses are like later in the game. You don't know how far you can push the limits of your in-game character.

They hit on your desire to learn, and your desire to master a system.

It is fun for humans to learn new things - that's what makes us thrive as a species.

We also have a driving desire to master certain things - just like sports atheletes always trying to maximize their performance. Like engineers trying to maximize the output of technology. Like programmers trying to maximize the efficiency of their code.

Maybe you have learned everything about a certain game. The structure of every level, how every enemy is coded, and all the glitches and bugs in a game.

You still don't know how far you can go in interacting with the game as a human. You still haven't physically mastered playing it. This is what drives some people to do speedruns and other challenges, and spend many hours having more fun with the game than the developers even imagined happening, because mastering things is a common player driven goal.

But once you've satisfied yourself, you've seen how far you can go and tried, you have the knowledge of having done it and that's it.

I've watched 100 days worth of anime. That's almost 400 different animes.

At some point, you notice that many of the story lines for these animes follow a very similar pattern. So similar, that it's almost as if some animes are just copy pasted reskins of each other. So repetitive, that you become disullisioned to these types of stories after the 50th time.

Once you get to this point, the animes that stick out to you, that bring you the most joy, are the ones that tell a significantly different story, the ones that are unique, the ones that you are ignorant of.

The first time you saw that one story structure that's been repeated 50 times, perhaps it was endearing and interesting the first time. But then you get used to it.

It's just like our sense of smell (or even all of our senses). You can't smell something for more than a few minutes, before you become unable to smell it - because your nose quickly gets used to it and you stop "sensing" it.

I've noticed this applies to any form of enjoyment. Good stories. Good music. Good artwork. Good food. Good fragrants. Good feelings.

But eventually, after some time of not engaging in it, you can experience things again and feel good about them again.

Maybe it's not as fun as the first time you were introduced to it, but you can have a lifetime of these experiences in a cycle of highs and lows.

Highs and lows are what games and cinema pay special attention to after all. If every point of a game or movie is a "high point", then people will quickly find it dull. That is why there has to be periods of quiet or normalcy, buildup, and spontaneous spikes in action.

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There are times when I watch really interesting, unique anime about love relationships. Because of my past experience in love relationships, I think I have a good understanding about how human brains tackle that topic, so I'm always watching the characters in these stories with the perspective of knowing - knowing every fault or mistake they're making, knowing what they could do better, knowing how they will probably react.

It's almost saddening - I know that if I were still a more naive person, if I were still like the people in that story, that this anime would have a much bigger emotional impact on me and be that much more endearing. What if I didn't know exactly how all parties were going to react to things? If I were just as clueless about love as the main character, having no idea where the story will lead? The moment the main character realizes something important that he's been getting wrong all along would be that much more impactful to me.

I wouldn't want to be a pig rolling in mud, but at some level, I'm missing out.

At the same time, when I do come across those unique, clever, and different stories that go beyond the stories that are repeated over 50 times, well, it's an even more amazing experience, because they're that far above the rest. And because I'm still ignorant of them.

Humanity as a collective is experiencing the same problem. Movies are being critically acclaimed to be mere reboots of old stories. And the few movies that do something unique, are the ones that get everyone's attention. We are exhausting the finite amount of creative things we can make at a certain level of knowledge - only finding things that are at another, higher level of knowledge to be interesting.

There is at least one anime that was so intellectually clever, that merely remembering some of the episodes is so distractingly exciting to me, that I have to stop myself from thinking about it when I'm trying to get work done. It's literally orgasmically clever every time I think about it. And I'm proud of having at least one thing that I don't easily become "numb" to.

And actually, I pride myself on my "ability" not to become numb to things as fast as other people.

I have an active mindset that knows how to avoid getting bored of things because of becoming numb to things I experience too much.

It makes everything I eat, every story I experience, every game I play, and my love life more enjoyable.

And all that is, is the acknowledgement that over-indulging leads to numbing. Or in the case of relationships, knowledge that the expectation that your feelings will never die out for even a moment is an erroneous judgement and that you're more likely to just experience spikes of happiness and that the point of the relationship isn't because humans are supposed to be wired to un-numbingly feel certain emotions, but because you want to live out the limited days of your left in your life with someone you can trust and enjoy being with.