The Curse of Knowing
Awareness, Authenticity, and Intelligence Make Modern Life a Bit of a Nightmare
Read time: Approx 5 mins.
Once you become aware, you cannot simply stuff that awareness back into its container. You will forever see the world differently.
There was a time when ignorance was, if not bliss, at least an effective sedative. Now, we have podcasts explaining the ethical violations of the supplement industry and TikToks dissecting the neocolonial undertones of your morning coffee. The moment you become aware, really aware, the world starts to feel like a badly written play, performed by people who don’t have any actual f**k what they’re doing.
You go to the office, and everyone’s celebrating Janet’s promotion with a sheet cake and disposable plastic forks, and you smile. You clap. But inside, you're unspooling. Because you know Janet makes 30% more than Steve, who’s quietly supported three departments for the last five years, and no one has the nerve to say it out loud (Yay for Steve’s selfless passivity!). And…Because you know the cake is made with palm oil, and that the company just posted a mental health awareness month message while simultaneously denying your coworker’s FMLA request. Awareness turns small things into ethical landmines. It’s exhausting.
This isn’t just about cake, or coffee, or capitalism. It’s about the chronic psychic ache of cognitive dissonance. Awareness gives us X-ray vision for the glaring hypocrisies of society, starting with our own. You scroll past a GoFundMe for someone’s emergency surgery and then order sushi from your phone with the other hand. You love animals but down a 16oz bacon-crusted ribeye most Saturday nights. You meditate every morning and then scream obscenities into traffic by 4 p.m. The dissonance is a staple of modern existence. And surviving it requires mental gymnastics Simone Biles herself might balk at.
We’re told to "be ourselves," as if that’s a clear, singular identity and not a collection of coping mechanisms forged during middle school lunch periods and performance reviews. The trouble is, authenticity isn’t always marketable. There’s no LinkedIn badge for “told the truth even though it made the patient uncomfortable.” Press Ganey would have a field day…
At work, you temper your real voice into something approximating “palatable.” You laugh at your boss’s story about his crypto losses because you want a raise, not a conversation. You hold back the impulse to say, “This doesn’t sit right with me,” when your company rolls out a vaguely colonial ‘expansion strategy’ into ‘untapped markets.’
Even in relationships, authenticity becomes a risk. You don’t admit that you hate this country song (or…all country songs…), or that you deeply despise large social events and chaotic crowds, or that you don’t want more kids, or that you sometimes fantasize about disappearing into a forest with nothing but a can opener and some therapy books. Instead, you become a curated, a more likable character—”Facebook you,” but in real life. Authenticity is a luxury good in the economy of appearances, and most of us are working with store credit.
There’s an argument to be made that intelligence is the most damning of all three traits. Just think of all those highly-renowned artists we grow up revering…Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vincent Van Gogh…all brilliant, all on the brink of perpetual mental collapse. Smart people notice patterns. They connect dots. And nothing ruins your day like understanding the global economic context behind the price of avocados.
You realize that billionaires don’t pay taxes (and are rewarded for it), that most charities are PR laundering machines, and that your recycled plastic bottle probably ended up in a landfill in Malaysia anyway. Knowledge doesn’t just open doors, it often slams them in your face. Because the more you know, the less innocent any of your choices feel. You don’t just “buy shampoo.” You navigate a labyrinth of greenwashing, microplastic guilt, and debates about parabens.
And then there’s emotional intelligence…You walk into a room and sense that Carol is annoyed about something Tim said in a meeting three weeks ago, and now she’s taking it out on Barb’s spreadsheet. You try to soothe the tension with humor, but then lie awake later wondering if your joke reinforced workplace misogyny.
As someone who has a hefty level of emotional sensitivity to those around me…this kind of awareness can feel more like a burden than a superpower. And the irony of both logic and awareness…the more you know, the better you are at understanding how little you can actually fix. #ExistentialDepression.
We pretend. Every day. And I don’t mean that in a cynical, dramatic way—I mean that pretending is a prerequisite for functioning. You pretend to care about the fourth quarter goals. You pretend to care about the Packers “young new recruits,” because somehow a grown man getting paid $35 million per year to run into another grown man gets drown out in the presence of an ever-expanding wealth gap across the country. You pretend to believe in meritocracy at the all-hands strategic planning meeting. You pretended to enjoy yesterday’s bougie brunch at that new “hip” spot down the road, even though it cost more than your childhood bicycle and included something called “aioli foam.”
We perform because not performing is dangerous. Nonconformity doesn’t just make you weird; it makes you unemployable, un-invitable, uninsurable. The world isn’t built to reward honesty. It's built to reward polish…to never (ever) name the hypocrisies and injustices of those upstream on the food chain. If you actually said what you felt in a performance review or a first date or even a PTA meeting, you'd be socially exiled within the hour. The irony, of course, is that everyone else is pretending too…
So we become actors in each other’s elaborate plays, applauding lines we don’t believe and pretending not to notice when the backdrop is on fire.
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
Somewhere between “heart emoji-ing” the endless barrage of text threads and Teams notifications (because, you know…silence is violence) and debating whether your dog has seasonal depression because…well, you do…it becomes clear: thriving in this world isn’t just difficult—it’s statistically improbable.
Mental health, once considered a personal issue, has now become something closer to a social barometer. According to the CDC, over 1 in 5 Americans live with a mental health disorder, with anxiety and depression topping the charts. But let’s be honest: the real number is likely much higher, because not everyone has the luxury, support, or the time off work to get a proper diagnosis and treatment plan.
Mental health is not an individual deficit or failure. It’s systemic. We’re living in a society designed for growth. For productivity. For never slowing down. For spending the bulk of our waking hours performing tasks we despise, in order to afford the things we’ve been conditioned to “need.” Everything must appear well and good, because any mention of cognitive dissonance or cracks in the logic, and it unravels the mirage of those around us…and we just can’t have that! Success requires a peculiar cocktail of self-denial, emotional suppression, and caffeine-induced optimism. Being “well” in this context often just means you’re good at ignoring red flags, both personal and global.
A therapist once told me that anxiety is a “rational response to the present state of the world.” I laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was the most honest thing I’d heard in months. Of course you’re anxious! Your brain is trying to make sense of climate doom, mass gun violence, political decay, subscription services (so many f**king subscription services…), 24/7 notifications, and whether or not your salary will sustain the ever-increasing impacts of inflation. Depression is your psyche waving a tiny white flag.
In a hyperconnected, hypercomplex society, the baseline isn't peace. It’s overwhelm. Every ping, every scroll, every “let’s jump on a quick call” is a paper cut on your nervous system. And then we wonder why people are burned out by 30, sedated by 35, and addicted to ketamine by 40.
To be “well-adjusted” to this world might actually be the deeper illness.
So how do we deal? Some of us drink. Others doomscroll. Some (guilty) remain in a perpetual state of smiling depression. A brave few join a yoga cult, escape to Peru for a $4500 Ayahuasca retreat, or go off-grid in Colorado. But most of us engage in a quiet kind of compartmentalization. We create mental drawers. In one, we store the part of us that wants justice and meaning. In another, the part that needs to pay rent and not get arrested by the IRS. We pull them out as needed and hope no one sees the cracks.
We also find kinship. The internet, for all its toxicity, lets us find others who are similarly disillusioned. It lets us meme our way through the pain, laugh at our contradictions, and write long, overly personal Substack articles when we, yet again, are unable to sleep at 2:00AM. It’s not a solution…but it’s something.
Despite everything—despite the overwhelming contradiction of modern life—there’s a kind of gritty, hard-won hope that grows in the cracks. Awareness, for all its torment, allows us to question systems that continue to fail us (good luck capitalism…). Authenticity, when practiced with openness, creates real intimacy. Intelligence, though isolating, helps us build better, smarter alternatives.
Maybe the goal isn’t to escape the suffering, but to become fluent in its language. To learn to navigate the dissonance instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. To accept that being awake in a world that profits from our sleepiness is painful, yes—but also powerful.
After all, we’re all in the play. Some of us just can’t stop noticing the props are cardboard, the lines are recycled, and the audience left years ago…but we’re still clapping like it means something.
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