Dear “I Don’t Know,”
You show up a lot.
We hear you when kids are asked why they did something. We hear you when we’re pressed to explain ourselves. We even hear you quietly in our own heads, right after we act and just before we rationalize.
“I don’t know.”
But maybe that answer isn’t ignorance. Maybe it’s honesty.
Most of what we do happens before awareness gets the memo. We reach. We react. We speak. We scroll. We snap. We soothe. And only afterward do we step in and narrate the story of why we think it happened. The truth is, a lot of living runs on background processes.
Habits. Conditioning. Repetition. Patterns learned so well they don’t need supervision anymore.
And that’s not a flaw. It’s a feature.
Imagine having to consciously deliberate every single choice you make. Every step. Every word. Every reaction. Pure, unfiltered free will with no automation at all. It sounds less like freedom and more like paralysis.
So when someone says, “I don’t know why I did that,” what they might really be saying is, “A subroutine just ran.” The system processed inputs based on prior programming and produced output. Not mysterious. Not magical. Just cause and effect doing what it does best.
We don’t ask a computer why it gave the answer it did. We ask how it was trained. What data shaped it. What patterns it learned to recognize. Maybe humans aren’t all that different.
So we turn to you, dear reader, and ask:
How much of your day is spent doing things you don’t remember choosing?
And if so much of life runs on habit and automation, is the real question about free will… or about the quality of the programming?
Pleasantly programmed,
~ The Radical Left