The Comedy of Knowing Nothing
I know nothing.
No, wait—maybe I know that I know nothing.
But how do I know that?
And if I don’t know that, then I don’t know nothing,
which means I might know something.
Which would mean I’m lying.
To myself.
About not knowing.
Which means I do know something:
That I’m a fraud.
…But what if the fraud is the one telling me I’m a fraud?
What if even that’s a lie?
What if all of this is just the universe trying to cough up a joke,
and I’m the phlegm?
People chase truth like it’s a missing sock.
They look under the bed of science,
in the laundry of religion,
in the junk drawer of therapy.
But maybe truth got bored.
Maybe it left the party a long time ago.
And we’re all standing around
arguing about who brought the chips.
I don’t know anything.
I don’t even know if I’m real.
I might be a thought someone forgot to finish.
A sentence that never got a period.
Just a dangling clause of consciousness
hanging from the ledge of meaning.
And while I dangle, the world burns.
Somewhere a child scrolls through war on TikTok
like it’s another trend to survive.
Somewhere a woman bleeds, and the law says
she deserved it—because her body speaks too loudly.
Somewhere a man mistakes a gun for manhood,
and someone else doesn’t get to go home.
And the algorithms hum like gods in the background,
feeding us curated panic
and dopamine crumbs.
We scream for justice
but can’t even agree on the definition.
We build identities like IKEA furniture—
cheap, wobbly, missing screws—
then get surprised when they fall apart mid-conversation.
We say “self-care”
while our souls rot from overexposure to unreality.
I don’t know anything.
But I feel everything.
And it hurts in places I can’t name
because the language is broken
and the grammar is grief.
And yet…
If this is what not-knowing feels like,
maybe ignorance isn’t empty—
maybe it’s the fullest thing of all.
So full, it spills over into laughter.
The kind that comes after a breakdown,
when your face is still wet with tears
and you laugh anyway—
because everything’s absurd,
and you’re still here,
and that alone
is a punchline.
I don’t know anything.
But I know this:
Whatever this comedy is—
I’m in it.
And maybe that’s enough
for tonight.