At 2 AM, I found myself on an online forum for insomniacs. Not because I couldn’t sleep—though sleep has become a stranger to me these past months—but because I was following a thread titled “Does anyone else feel like they’re pretending to be human?”
The responses broke my heart and healed it simultaneously.
A woman in Tokyo wrote: “I keep waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Okay, the test is over. You can stop pretending you know what you’re doing now.'” A man in São Paulo replied: “Every day I wake up and think, surely today I’ll feel like I understand what’s happening. I’m thirty-seven. Still waiting.”
I sat in my small room, Happy and Arash sleeping peacefully nearby, and felt more connected to these strangers than I had to anyone in months. Not because we shared interests or backgrounds or beliefs, but because we shared the most intimate secret of all: none of us know what we’re doing here.
This is the conversation that happens in the spaces between conversations—the acknowledgment that we’re all improvising our way through existence, making up the rules as we go, hoping no one notices that we’re completely lost. And the beautiful, terrifying truth is that everyone notices because everyone is equally lost.
Yesterday, I was in line at the bank behind an elderly woman who kept asking the teller to repeat the instructions for depositing a check. “I’m sorry,” she said after the third explanation, “I just don’t understand how everything became so complicated.” The young teller, probably twenty-two, smiled gently and said, “Ma’am, honestly? I don’t understand most of it either. I just memorized which buttons to press.”
In that moment, the decades between them collapsed. Age, experience, position—all the markers we use to convince ourselves that some people have figured it out—revealed themselves as costume changes in the same confused play.
I think about this when people talk about “adults” as if it’s a species they’ll eventually evolve into. When I was Arash’s age, I believed that somewhere around thirty, a transformation would occur. Clarity would descend like a morning mist lifting. I would understand mortgages and politics and how to fix broken things. I would know who I was supposed to be and how to become that person.
Instead, I discovered that adulthood is just childhood with bills. The same questions that kept me awake at eleven keep me awake at thirty-nine, only now they’re dressed in more sophisticated language. Instead of “Why do I have to go to school?” it’s “What is the point of any of this?” Instead of “Are monsters real?” it’s “Am I becoming the monster?”
But here’s the secret they don’t tell you: this shared confusion is its own kind of intimacy. When someone admits they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re offering you the most vulnerable part of themselves. They’re saying, “Here I am, pretending to be competent, but actually just hoping I don’t break anything important.”
I remember the first time Happy told me she felt like a fraud as a mother. We were sitting on this same balcony, Arash was maybe two, and she said, “Everyone else seems to know instinctively what to do. I’m just guessing and praying I don’t mess him up too badly.” I felt such relief—not because she was struggling, but because she was honest about struggling. In that moment, our marriage became real in a way it hadn’t been before.
This is what happens when we stop pretending we have answers: we discover that questions are more intimate than solutions. When I meet someone who claims to have figured out God, politics, parenting, love, I feel profoundly alone. But when I meet someone who says, “I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m trying my best,” I feel like I’ve found family.
There’s a man in our building who nodded at me for three years without us ever speaking. Last month, the elevator broke down with us inside. After ten minutes of awkward silence, he said, “Do you ever feel like you’re an actor who forgot their lines?” We spent the next hour talking about everything we’d both been pretending to understand. When the elevator finally moved, we both looked disappointed.
This is the paradox of human connection: we bond not over our certainties but over our uncertainties. Not over what we know but over what we don’t know and our shared bewilderment at not knowing it. The deepest friendships aren’t built on common interests but on common confusions.
I think about my father, who died before we could have this conversation. He carried himself with such apparent certainty, such clear knowledge of right and wrong, proper and improper. I spent years feeling inadequate next to his confidence. Only now do I realize he was probably just as lost as everyone else, but from a generation that wasn’t allowed to admit it.
How different our relationship might have been if he had said, even once, “Son, I have no idea what I’m doing either.” How much closer we might have been if we could have shared our confusion instead of him pretending to have answers and me pretending to understand them.
The online forum thread has grown to 847 responses now. People from six continents, speaking dozens of languages, all admitting the same thing: they feel like imposters in their own lives. A teacher in Mumbai confesses she Googles basic educational concepts the night before classes. A doctor in Berlin admits he still feels like he’s playing dress-up in his white coat. A mother in Chicago writes that she keeps waiting for her “maternal instincts” to kick in and wondering if there’s something wrong with her that they haven’t.
What strikes me isn’t their individual struggles but their collective relief at finding each other. This is what we’re all searching for—not people who have answers, but people who share our questions. Not guides who can show us the way, but fellow travelers who are just as lost as we are.
The beautiful irony is that admitting we don’t know what we’re doing is the most human thing we can do. It’s the confession that makes us real to each other. When we drop the pretense of competence and admit our fundamental bewilderment, we create space for genuine connection.
Maybe this is what love really is—not finding someone who completes us or understands us or even someone who has their life figured out. Maybe love is finding someone who is just as confused as you are but willing to be confused together. Someone who will sit with you at 2 AM and admit that they, too, feel like they’re making it all up as they go along.
Happy stirs in her sleep, and I close the laptop. I’ll never meet those people from the forum in person, but I’ll carry their honesty with me. Tomorrow, when I encounter someone pretending to have their life figured out, I’ll remember that beneath the performance is probably someone just like me—someone hoping that if they act confident enough, maybe confidence will follow.
And maybe, if I’m brave enough, I’ll offer them what those strangers offered me: the gift of admitting I don’t know what I’m doing either. The strange intimacy of shared confusion. The acknowledgment that we’re all just humans, pretending to be human, hoping someone will notice and love us anyway.
