I watched my neighbor install a mailbox this morning with the confident movements of someone who clearly knew what they were doing—until I saw them quietly google “how to install a mailbox” when they thought no one was looking. The performance of competence had been so convincing that I almost believed it myself, even while witnessing the reality underneath.
This is the magnificent human comedy we’re all starring in: the collective pretense that everyone else received the instruction manual for life that we somehow missed. We walk around performing certainty about mortgages and career decisions and parenting strategies, all while secretly questioning whether we’re qualified to make any of these choices at all.
The performance begins early. Watch children play “house” or “office” or “school”—they’re already practicing the art of acting like adults who know what they’re doing. By the time we become actual adults, we’re method actors who have forgotten we’re acting, delivering lines about five-year plans and market strategies with the conviction of people who actually understand what these words mean.
But here’s the secret hiding in plain sight: nobody really knows what they’re doing. Not your boss, not your doctor, not your parents, not the president. They’re all making educated guesses, hoping their last decision wasn’t catastrophic, and praying that their next one will work out better than they have any right to expect.
The doctor who confidently prescribes your medication spent twenty minutes googling your symptoms before you walked in. The financial advisor managing your retirement fund is as mystified by market fluctuations as you are. The teacher shaping your child’s mind figured out yesterday’s lesson plan during this morning’s shower.
This isn’t incompetence—it’s the human condition. We’re all navigating a world that’s too complex to fully understand, making decisions based on incomplete information, hoping that experience plus intuition plus luck will somehow add up to wisdom.
The tragedy is how alone we feel in this uncertainty. Because everyone else appears to move through life with such purpose, such clarity, such obvious knowledge of the right thing to do next, we assume we’re the only ones improvising, the only ones scared, the only ones making it up as we go along.
But observe what happens when the performance cracks—when someone admits they don’t know, when someone asks for help, when someone reveals their uncertainty. Instead of judgment or loss of respect, there’s usually relief. Finally, someone honest. Finally, someone human. Finally, someone like us.
The pretense serves a function, though. If we all admitted how much we’re winging it, society might collapse under the weight of collective uncertainty. Maybe the performance of knowing is a necessary fiction, a collaborative delusion that keeps us functional enough to keep trying, growing, building something together despite our individual cluelessness.
I think about my son, who asks me questions I can’t answer with the confidence that I will somehow know the right response. “Why do people get divorced? How do you know if someone loves you? What happens when we die?” He doesn’t know that I’m googling child psychology articles at midnight, that I’m making up answers to questions that have stumped philosophers for millennia, that I’m as confused about these mysteries as he is.
But maybe that’s okay. Maybe knowing isn’t the point. Maybe the point is being willing to engage with uncertainty, to make decisions without guarantees, to keep trying despite having no idea if we’re doing it right.
The most competent-seeming people aren’t those who never feel lost—they’re those who’ve gotten comfortable with lostness, who’ve learned to navigate uncertainty with grace, who’ve accepted that not knowing is the permanent human condition and have decided to proceed anyway.
Because here’s what I’m slowly learning: confidence isn’t about knowing what you’re doing—it’s about trusting that you’ll figure it out as you go. Competence isn’t about having all the answers—it’s about being willing to live the questions until the answers reveal themselves, or don’t.
Maybe the real skill isn’t pretending to know what we’re doing—it’s learning to do what needs doing without the comfort of knowing. Maybe wisdom isn’t certainty but the courage to act thoughtfully in the face of uncertainty.
Tonight, when my son asks me another impossible question, I want to try something radical: honesty. “I don’t know,” I want to say, “but let’s figure it out together.” Because maybe the best thing I can teach him isn’t that adults have all the answers, but that it’s possible to live a full, meaningful, even successful life while being appropriately uncertain about almost everything.
We’re all walking around pretending we know what we’re doing because that’s the most beautiful pretense our species has invented—the collective agreement to act as if we’re competent enough to deserve the lives we’re trying to build.
And somehow, amazingly, it works.