We live in an age of abundant access to information. With information comes knowledge—or so thought the idealists who led us down this path. Over time, we came to understand the darker side of “Information wants to be free.” Information can be true or false, illuminating or deceptive, intended to empower or to manipulate. Just as importantly, there are practical limits to the how much information a human being can consume.

By making information free, we opened the floodgates without preparing ourselves to withstand the deluge, nor to filter contaminants from the life-giving water. We made matters worse by pouring ourselves directly into the flood, reprogramming our minds to turn every individual into their own information source: what we thought, how we felt, even where we went and what we ate—all information broadcast from one to many spreading across the information landscape like weeds overtaking a garden. Along the way we became drunk on the feeling of knowing, of being right, of pointing out where others are wrong.

Information had become so plentiful that it became meaningless. We disconnected from the idea of shared reality and turned once more to the people we trusted. Institutions that were built on our participation in this shared reality crumbled. Information was no longer true or false, it was personal. Yet our attachment to the feeling of being right continued to linger.

This attachment holds us back in ways most of us don’t realize. The information age is a paradox: all of the knowledge in the world is more accessible to more humans than it has ever been; at the same time, the terrain is more treacherous and impossible to navigate than ever before. In order to learn and grow from the knowledge available to us, while avoiding the thorns and toxins, we must regain what we lost along the way towards our obsession with being right. To be curious, to wonder, to seek to learn from others rather than judge them—to be humble, to admit we don’t know, to make ourselves vulnerable—these things come naturally to children. We must relearn how to be childlike in these ways.

Yuval Noah Harari referred to the start of the scientific revolution in the 16th century as the “Discovery of Ignorance”. In the 21st century, we have nearly lost what our ancestors found. We need to rediscover ignorance.