WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

The train carriage reeked of ash and bad poetry. I was seated opposite a man who looked like a jacket potato in a suit, reading a newspaper as though it owed him money.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked.

“No” she said.

“You’re wearing a watch” he said.

“Exactly” she said.

I know how things work, or rather, I know the theatre of how things work.

I know computers – transistors, logic gates, their syntax and structure, their sterile binary heartbeat.

I understand electricity well enough to make a lemon battery. I know how a lightbulb works, how air conditioning cools, how heating systems warm, or at least, burn from a safe distance.

I understand the general concept of building a house – foundations, walls, roofs, insulation. I know how toilets work. I’ve seen how water is pumped, and how sewage systems are a thing. I know how satellites circle overhead like dead stars whispering coordinates to the GPS in your pocket.

But do I really know any of it?

Suppose I suddenly woke up in the grime and plague-pocked cobbles of medieval England. No Google, no manuals, no Amazon to deliver me duct tape and 9V batteries. Just me, and the mud. I’d be the most educated and intellectually unprepared person alive.

I know everything – and yet, nothing.

Sure, I can describe how electricity works, but can I generate it? I could draw a simple electric circuit, but could I build one from scratch, with no modern tools, no components, and no materials.

Oh, lemons! Copper and zinc? “Just refine some ore,” I’d say – but how? From where? Using what tools? What temperatures? What furnace design? How do I even find copper ore in the wild?

I know how steam engines function, but could I build one? Not without metalworking tools, precision parts, knowledge of metallurgy, pressure tolerances – things that took humanity centuries to master.

I know how printing presses changed the world, but could I invent one from memory? Maybe, but could I cast movable type? Make ink? Summon paper from pulped trees and desperation?

Even growing food – I know how food grows – in theory. Crop rotation, soil pH, pest control, but in practice? I’d be gnawing on bark while forgetting which berries don’t kill me.

For knowledge without application is just arrogance with good handwriting.

Knowledge is built on the foundations of a prior knowledge that we think we know. At least, until some curious child asks you how clouds work and suddenly, your world comes crashing down with such insignificant impact. And you wonder what’s worse, you not knowing anything, or you not knowing that you do not know anything.

Because you live your lives walking on scaffolds built by others, pretending you could lay the bricks yourself if the need arose thanks to your vast, shallow ocean of modern knowledge. – Them echoes in your mind of a Wikipedia page you read once combined with that time you played Minecraft on Survival mode. Only to find nothing is there but broken shortcuts all over the desktop of your mind.

What do you actually know?

Because all I actually know, really, is that you can’t lick your own elbow…