I spent an hour constructing an elaborate theory about David Chang and Chris Ying's friendship and Anthony Bourdain’s suicide.
Based on nothing more than podcast clips and my own neuroses about intimacy between successful men.
By the end, I had convinced myself that I understood their dynamic, finances, even the unspoken thoughts that passed between them.
It felt productive. It felt like insight. It was, of course, complete bullshit. And the bullshit, I now see, was the point. Not the insight, but the frantic, desperate need for it.
But here's what troubles me: I cannot stop doing this. None of us can. We have created a culture where not knowing has become inadmissible. Where every cultural phenomenon must be immediately explained, contextualised, and transformed into content.
The idea that something might remain opaque, that we might encounter mystery and simply sit with it, has become psychologically intolerable.
Once the thought appeared that Chang’s re-found success with his Netflix show and podcast was due to Chris Ying, and that this meant something for the wider workplace all bets were off.
I even had a cute word play for the title: “Mise en Potes” and a deconstruction of a famous GQ cover for the image.
The very notion that something might remain dense, that we might simply sit with the discomfort of mystery, has become psychologically intolerable.
Observe the ritual: a cultural phenomenon emerges, and within hours, the explanation machine roars to life. Hot takes, think pieces, cultural analyses—a frantic scramble to fill the vacuum of uncertainty with assertions of meaning. We cannot bear the space between observation and understanding.
We must know what it means, neatly packaged and ready for consumption. And if it doesn't fit, we force it. Stretch it. Shrink it. Contort it until it conforms to the pre-existing mould of our understanding.
This isn't truly about David Chang. It's about an economy of knowledge built upon our collective inability to tolerate uncertainty. Every think piece, every cultural analysis, every self-assured declaration of what things "really mean" is, at its core, anxiety medication disguised as insight.
We have transformed the entire apparatus of intellectual discourse into an elaborate defense mechanism against the fundamental opacity of existence.
In Zen practice, there exists a concept: mushin, "don’t-know mind." It is the radical acceptance that our fundamental relationship to reality is one of not-knowing, and that this not-knowing is not a problem to be solved, but a condition to be inhabited.
The master Seung Sahn, when confronted with complex philosophical inquiries, would often respond with a simple, resonant "don’t know." Not as a dismissal, but as the most honest, most profound response to existence’s inherent mystery. It is a surrender, a profound letting go, a refusal to impose order where none exists.
Our critical culture, however, has cultivated the inverse pathology: the "must-know mind." It is the compulsive need to transmute every encounter with ambiguity into certainty, every question into an answer, every mystery into an explanation.
The result is a kind of intellectual obesity, a gorging on explanations until the very distinction between genuine understanding and the mere sensation of having consumed information dissolves. We mistake the fullness derived from reading takes about a thing for actually knowing the thing itself.
But the human cost extends beyond the realm of superficial analysis or bad criticism. We are, in effect, manufacturing individuals incapable of encountering their own lives without immediately converting raw experience into digestible explanation.
We cannot sit with their own uncertainty, their own confusion, their own profound not-knowing, without a frantic rush to technology or to some self-proclaimed expert who will tell them what it all means.
We are raising children who panic when not immediately understanding something, who cannot tolerate the discomfort of confusion long enough for genuine learning to occur.
We are forging adults who prefer the confident wrong answer to the uncertain, yet profoundly right, question. We are creating a generation of intellectual invalids, crippled by their own need for immediate, absolute answers.
Consider the insidious effect this has on human relationships. When we cannot bear the inherent mystery of other people—their motivations, their labyrinthine inner lives, the true reasons for their actions—we substitute genuine encounters with elaborate interpretation.
We construct intricate psychological profiles of our friends, our partners, our children, and then, tragically, mistake these brittle constructions for authentic knowledge.
We forfeit the capacity for genuine surprise, for the transformative power of contact with true otherness. We are not engaging with souls, but with carefully constructed fictions, our own projections masquerading as understanding.
The artificial intelligence revolution has only accelerated this pathology, fostering the illusion that all information is accessible, all questions answerable.
When a machine can confidently enumerate David Chang’s net worth, when it can generate sophisticated-sounding analyses of phenomena about which I possess no genuine understanding, the very boundary between knowledge and speculation blurs into oblivion.
The machine’s inherent inability to utter “I don’t know” becomes, terrifyingly, our own. We have built gods in our own image, and they, like us, are terrified of the void.
Yet, even before the advent of AI, we were already deep within this crisis. Academic culture, with its relentless pursuit of publication, rewards confident assertion over acknowledged ignorance.
The media, ever hungry for clicks, incentivises hot takes over patient observation. Social platforms, in their infinite wisdom, amplify the voices that sound most certain, irrespective of whether that certainty bears any resemblance to actual knowledge.
We are drowning in a sea of manufactured certainty that only serves to obscure the quiet, unsettling truth.
Ryan Ruby’s declaration of a “golden age of criticism,” 1even as literary studies departments hemorrhage students and funding, is not confidence; it is a shriek of panic.
Those who dare to admit they don’t understand something, who confesses uncertainty, who suggests that a phenomenon might be irreducibly mysterious, receives no book deal, builds no platform, gains no followers.
We have constructed an economy of explanation that simply cannot afford to acknowledge its own fundamental ignorance. It is a market that thrives on the illusion of omniscience, a system that punishes the honest admission of intellectual humility.
This has transformed criticism from a practice of careful, attentive engagement into a form of elaborate speculation. We no longer read to understand; we read to acquire material for our next pronouncement. We consume culture not for its intrinsic value, but as raw material for the relentless engine of content generation.
The profound experience of not-knowing, of sitting with mystery, of allowing things to remain opaque, has been systematically expunged from our critical discourse. We are not critics; we are prospectors, mining the rich veins of ambiguity for the glittering ore of explanation.
What we have lost, then, is the capacity for genuine encounter with reality. When everything must be immediately explained, nothing can truly surprise us. When every cultural phenomenon is force-fitted into familiar frameworks, we cease to see what is actually there. We become tourists in our own lives, collecting interpretations instead of having authentic experiences.
The parasitic metaphor, indeed, is apt, but not in the simplistic way literary theorists often intend. Critics have become parasites not on individual texts or artists, but on uncertainty itself.
We feed on mystery, transforming it into explanation, until nothing mysterious remains. We are consuming the very thing that makes culture worth contemplating in the first place.
What would our work look like if it could truly tolerate not-knowing? If it could sit with mystery without the immediate, compulsive urge to dissolve it?
If it could encounter the profound density of other people’s lives, other people’s work, other people’s relationships, and simply acknowledge it, rather than presuming to see through it?
It might, by current metrics, look like failure. It might produce fewer confident assertions, generate less engagement, provide less of that fleeting sense of intellectual satisfaction.
It might force us to confront the uncomfortable truth that much of what we believe we know about culture, about other people, about the very meaning of things, is an elaborate projection disguised as analysis.
It would be a criticism of humility, a criticism of silence, a criticism that knows when to shut up. But it might also restore something profoundly lost: the capacity for genuine encounter with otherness.
The radical ability to let things be strange, to resist the immediate domestication of the unfamiliar through explanation. The recognition that mystery is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to be received.
A Zen student asks the master, “What is Buddha?” The master replies, “Three pounds of flax.” This is not an explanation; it is an invitation to shed the very need for explanation. To encounter reality directly, unmediated by the distorting lens of conceptual understanding.
Our critical faculties possess no equivalent to “three pounds of flax.” We have no means of pointing to the irreducible mystery of things without simultaneously explaining what that mystery means.
We cannot allow David Chang to simply be David Chang without transforming him into a symbol of something else, a representative of some larger cultural trend, a case study in contemporary masculinity or entrepreneurship or whatever convenient framework we happen to be carrying.
We cannot simply be with the thing itself; we must know the thing itself, and in knowing, we destroy it and are left with something conceptual.
The deepest critique of contemporary cultural criticism is not that it gets things wrong, but that it cannot bear to get nothing at all.
It cannot tolerate the fertile, unsettling space of not-knowing that is the only honest response to the genuine otherness of other people’s lives and these times.
This is why criticism feels increasingly hollow, why even sophisticated cultural analysis often reads like elaborate guesswork, why the proliferation of takes has not led to any discernible increase in actual understanding. We have, tragically, mistaken the elimination of uncertainty for the production of insight.
The way forward is not found in better methods of analysis, or more rigorous fact-checking, or even more sophisticated theoretical frameworks.
It lies in the cultivation of what we might call critical mushin—a state of no-mind that can encounter cultural phenomena without the immediate, reflexive urge to explain, categorise, or contextualise them.
This would demand acknowledging that the most interesting aspects of culture—why certain books move us so profoundly, why certain relationships endlessly fascinate, why certain moments capture the collective imagination—are fundamentally mysterious, and perhaps, must remain so.
It would mean admitting that after all our analysis, David Chang remains as opaque to us as he was before we began writing about him. That our explanations of his friendship with Chris Ying tell us more about our own loneliness than about their actual relationship.
That, the most honest thing we can say about most cultural phenomena is: I don't know what this means, and maybe that's okay.
The unbearable lightness of not knowing is only unbearable if we refuse to bear it. Once accepted, it becomes the ground for genuine attention, real encounter, authentic response. It becomes the foundation for work that serves mystery rather than destroying it.
But this would require a fundamental shift in how we understand our work. Instead of explaining culture, we might learn to witness it. Instead of producing knowledge, we might cultivate presence.
Instead of having something to say about everything, we might discover the revolutionary potential of having nothing to say at all. The alternative is what we have now.
We are living in the aftermath of curiosity, in the ruins of wonder. But ruins can be rebuilt, if we can remember how to not know things.
https://www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/a-golden-age-ryan-ruby-on-literary-criticism-and-the-internet