Is ignorance actually a bliss?

“I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.” –

The Underground Man, Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Is being too consciousness and having too much knowledge and awareness serves in your advantage? Or it does not serve in our way? Is ignorance really a bliss?

This has been one of the topics I have been experimenting myself for some time now.

And there is no better tortured thinker who can answer my question other than Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The 20^th century writer Dostoevsky in his book “Notes from Underground” wrote:

… excessive consciousness is a disease.

These words from the underground man got me thinking and I think I found my answers to my quest. Here I present:

I have realized being too conscious about everything leads to analysis paralysis. And not being able to act and make decisions which has become the disease of today’s world. Today’s world full of information has everything in our reach within a matter of seconds. We have answers for everything, and it has never been easier to be conscious than today.

This often leads to making the mistake of questioning the advantages and disadvantages of the any ideas or thoughts and finally end of doing nothing. This also has been the cause of modern day anxiety and stress as too much information is overwhelming us. And being too conscious does not allow us to utilize this information through action.

Often, some of us try to be conscious of our consciousness and still end of not being the man of action. We do know all the time that action is important than just having knowledge for everything. But when it comes to doing we justify our inaction with some façade knowledge that our consciousness arms us with. Dostoevsky writes:

“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You may say I’m not worth bothering with; in that case, I can say exactly the same to you. We are talking seriously. And if you do not deign to give me your attention, I will not bow before you. I have my underground.”

I was trying to relate this to the business world and came to a book “Built to last” by Jim Collins. Here he argues most of the successful visionary companies tried a lot of stuffs and kept what worked for their business and weren’t too conscious. Visionary companies like J&J, HP, 3M and many other didn’t thought a lot they just went through the principle of ‘Experimental Doodling’. They just focused on evolutionary progress and kept moving. This I believe wouldn’t have been possible had they been thinking a lot and knew anything beforehand.

But here we, most of us, are where we think we know more and calculate the pros and cons of doing something and end up finally doing nothing. Except we do one thing: we end of despising ourselves for having knowingly deceived ourselves.

So is ignorance really a bliss?

I don’t really know whether being ignorant is a bliss, but I do know that it will leads us to nowhere.

Now I think I have lied to you that I said above I have found an answer but, honestly, I really haven’t other than just balancing between the consciousness and the action like the Yin and Yang of the Chinese philosophy.