Everything Feels Empty Now

The Knowledge We Lost When We Started Explaining Everything

At three in the morning in A&E, waiting for a bed to become available, I understood something about knowledge that no medical textbook could teach. The waiting room had emptied of the minor injuries and worried well, leaving only those of us who would be admitted, who had crossed some invisible threshold from concern to crisis. I watched my own body with detached curiosity, wondering how ill I actually was, trying to decode the signals that had brought me here. Across from me, a mother sat with her daughter who couldn’t have been more than twelve, the girl’s head resting on her mother’s shoulder, both of them beyond words now, beyond explanation. No one was speaking anymore; we had all passed into that peculiar state where language becomes irrelevant. The mother’s hand smoothed her daughter’s hair in an ancient rhythm, and in that gesture was contained everything: fear, love, exhaustion, hope. I thought of my own children, asleep at home and felt that same wordless pull, that knowledge that exists in the bones rather than the brain. The fluorescent lights hummed their antiseptic tune, but what filled that room was older than electricity, older than medicine, older than words themselves: the weight of care, dense and palpable, transmitted through presence alone.

We have forgotten how to value what cannot be said. More precisely, we have forgotten that the unsayable exists at all, that there are forms of knowledge that live in the body, in gesture, in presence, in the spaces between words. We have built a civilisation that privileges the articulable, the explicit, the codifiable, as if human experience could be fully captured in language, as if everything that matters could be converted into words, procedures, systems. But the most profound truths of our existence, the ones that actually sustain us through the night, resist this conversion. They live elsewhere, in a realm we are rapidly forgetting how to access or even acknowledge.

This forgetting is not conspiracy but drift. Centuries of intellectual development have progressively narrowed our conception of legitimate knowledge. The Enlightenment taught us to distrust what could not be rationally articulated. The scientific revolution insisted that only what could be observed and measured was truly real. The industrial age extracted craft knowledge from workers and converted it into written procedures. The information age promises that everything can be datafied, tagged, searchable. At each stage, we gained immense power, but we also learned to mistake the lamp for the landscape, confusing what we can illuminate with all that exists.

Consider what happens when you try to explain how to ride a bicycle. You can describe the mechanics, the physics of balance and momentum, the sequence of movements. But none of this actually teaches someone to ride. The knowledge lives in the doing, in the moment when suddenly everything clicks and you’re moving through space in a way that felt impossible seconds before. This embodied knowledge, what philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge,” cannot be fully articulated because it exists below or beside language. It must be absorbed through practice, through repetition, through the gradual training of nerve and muscle until the body knows what the mind cannot fully explain.

This same principle extends far beyond physical skills. Think about how you learned to read social situations, to sense when someone is lying, to know when to speak and when to remain quiet. No one gave you a manual. You absorbed these capacities through thousands of small observations, through trial and error, through the slow accumulation of pattern recognition that operates below conscious awareness. You know more than you can say and what you cannot say is often more important than what you can.

Of course, this absorption of social knowledge isn’t universal or automatic. For many neurodivergent people, these unspoken rules remain genuinely unspoken, illegible, a code that others seem to share but never explain. The tacit social knowledge that some absorb without effort must be deliberately studied and explicitly learned. And here’s the complexity: the very explicitness that threatens to flatten human experience can also be liberating for those who need the implicit made visible. Yet even those who require explicit social maps often possess their own forms of deep, embodied knowledge: the autistic person who perceives patterns in data that others miss entirely, who knows through their whole body when a texture or sound is wrong, whose systematic understanding reveals truths that social intuition obscures.

The challenge isn’t to choose between explicit and tacit knowledge but to honour both, to recognise that different minds access and create meaning through different channels, all of them legitimate, none of them complete.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of practical wisdom: phronesis. Unlike episteme (theoretical knowledge) or techne (technical skill), phronesis is the ability to perceive what matters in particular situations and act accordingly. It cannot be reduced to rules or procedures because every situation is unique, shot through with contingency and context. The person with phronesis doesn’t apply universal principles; they read the specific texture of the moment and respond with judgement honed by experience. This is the knowledge of the experienced teacher who senses when a struggling student needs challenge versus comfort, of the nurse who knows something is wrong even when all the monitors show normal readings, of the parent who can distinguish between the cries that mean hunger, discomfort, or simply the need to be held.

We are systematically eliminating the conditions that allow such wisdom to develop. Every domain of human activity is being subjected to what we might call the tyranny of explicitness: the demand that everything be spelled out, documented, made transparent and accountable. The demand for explicitness seems reasonable, even progressive. It promises to democratise knowledge, eliminate bias, protect us from arbitrary power. A surgical checklist saves lives. A marking rubric defends against caprice. But these benefits rest on a false premise: that everything worth knowing can be made explicit. When we act on this premise, we don’t actually eliminate the tacit dimension; we simply drive it underground, where it operates without acknowledgement or cultivation.

I think of master craftspeople, people who could look at a piece of wood and see not just its current form but its potential, who could feel irregularities in a surface too subtle for any instrument to measure. When apprenticeship systems were replaced by vocational schools, something essential was lost. Not just specific techniques, but a whole way of being in relation to materials, tools, and traditions. The apprentice learning alongside the master absorbs not just procedures but presence: how to stand, how to see, how to develop the patience that allows skill to ripen slowly. This transmission happens through proximity and time, through what anthropologist Jean Lave calls “legitimate peripheral participation,” the gradual movement from observing to assisting to practising under guidance to eventual mastery.

The same loss occurs in every field subjected to standardisation. When hospitals reduce nursing to tasks to be charted, they lose the quiet noticing that catches deterioration hours before monitors register it. When schools script teaching to ensure consistent delivery, they eliminate the space where teachers can follow unexpected questions into better lessons than any plan permitted. The tacit is not mystical; it is simply not exhaustible in description. It requires time, proximity, and a culture that values what cannot be fully named.

But perhaps nowhere is the poverty of explicit knowledge more apparent than in our attempts to understand consciousness itself. We can map neural correlates, measure brain waves, identify which regions light up during different mental states. Yet none of this touches the essential mystery: what it feels like to be you, the unique texture of your inner life, the way the world appears from the irreducible first-person perspective that constitutes your existence. Philosophers call this the “hard problem” of consciousness, hard precisely because it involves something that cannot be captured in third-person, objective description.

The filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky understood this limitation with particular clarity. He argued that art exists precisely to express what cannot be said directly, that its purpose is not to communicate ideas that could be better expressed in words but to create experiences that awaken knowledge we already possess but cannot articulate. When you stand before a Rothko painting and feel something shift inside you, when a piece of music moves you to tears for reasons you cannot explain, when a film leaves you changed in ways you struggle to identify, you are encountering knowledge that exists outside language. The artwork is not a code to be cracked or a message to be decoded; it is a technology for accessing aspects of human experience that resist linguistic capture.

This is why the current fashion for explaining and interpreting everything is so destructive. We are told that nothing should be ambiguous, that clarity is always a virtue, that if something cannot be explained then it probably doesn’t mean anything at all. But ambiguity is not failure; it is often the only honest response to the complexity of experience. When we demand that everything be made clear, we don’t achieve greater understanding. We impoverish our relationship with reality, cutting ourselves off from everything that won’t fit into words.

The Japanese have a concept, ma, that illuminates this perfectly. Ma refers to negative space, pause, the interval between things. In architecture, it’s the empty space that gives rooms their character. In music, it’s the silence that makes sound meaningful. In conversation, it’s the pause that allows words to resonate. Ma cannot be pointed to directly because it is precisely what is not there, yet it shapes everything around it. The Western mind, trained to focus on presence rather than absence, on speech rather than silence, on the explicit rather than the implicit, struggles even to perceive ma, let alone value it.

I learned about ma not through explanation but through experience, sitting in a traditional tea house where every element, from the placement of stones in the garden to the arrangement of flowers in the alcove, created a quality of presence that had nothing to do with the objects themselves and everything to do with the relationships between them. The knowledge communicated by that space could not have been conveyed through any amount of description. It had to be inhabited, breathed, absorbed through the skin.

Later, in that A&E waiting room, I recognised ma again. A nurse dimmed a light without being asked. A doctor paused for an extra beat before speaking. The room’s entire atmosphere shifted, almost imperceptibly, creating a pocket of calm within the crisis. There was no protocol for it, no box to tick on the electronic record. Yet everyone who worked there knew it mattered. They were practising a kind of medicine that no algorithm could replicate, creating healing through presence as much as procedure.

This points toward what we desperately need: an aesthetics of the implicit, a way of being in the world that honours what cannot be said, that makes space for the unsayable, that resists the totalitarian demand for everything to be brought into the harsh light of explicit articulation. This is not mysticism or obscurantism. It is a recognition that human beings are more than information processors, that meaning exceeds what can be captured in propositions, that the deepest truths often cannot be spoken because speech would diminish them.

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty understood this when he wrote about the primacy of perception, arguing that we know the world first through our bodies, through a kind of understanding that precedes language and can never be fully translated into it. The warmth of sunlight on skin, the weight of grief in the chest, the expansion of joy that seems to push against the boundaries of the body: these are not metaphors for “real” knowledge. They are knowledge itself, primary and irreducible, the foundation on which all our elaborate conceptual structures are built.

What would it mean to take this seriously? It would mean redesigning our institutions to preserve space for the implicit, to protect the conditions under which tacit knowledge can develop and be transmitted. It would mean valuing presence as much as productivity, wisdom as much as information, depth as much as coverage. It would mean accepting that the most important things often cannot be measured, assessed, or quality assured, that they must be trusted, cultivated and allowed to unfold in their own time.

In medicine, it means preserving bedside teaching, where students learn not just clinical facts but how to be with suffering, how to read the subtle signs that don’t appear in any textbook, how to develop the intuition that can mean the difference between life and death. It means protecting the time doctors need to simply sit with patients, to let patterns emerge that only become visible through unhurried attention. It means acknowledging that the hand on the shoulder, the adjusted light, the moment of silence before delivering difficult news, these are not additions to medical care but essential components of it.

In education, it means understanding that the most profound learning often happens in the margins: in conversations after class, in the wrestling with difficult texts that yields no immediate understanding but plants seeds that may not germinate for years. It would mean trusting teachers to respond to their students as individuals rather than data points, to follow hunches, to teach what cannot be tested because it might be what matters most. It would mean bringing back apprenticeship, not as hierarchy but as the mechanism through which phronesis is transmitted across generations.

In our personal lives, it would mean resisting the pressure to optimise every moment, to turn every experience into content, to articulate and share everything we think and feel. It would mean protecting our inner lives from the demand for transparency, maintaining what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls the “unthought known,” the aspects of ourselves that we sense but cannot fully bring into consciousness, that guide us from depths we cannot fathom.

Even as artificial intelligence promises to make everything explicit, predictable, optimised, we must insist on preserving the human spaces where ambiguity and intuition reign. Not as a retreat from progress but as a recognition that progress itself depends on preserving what cannot be programmed. The question is not whether we will live alongside intelligent machines but how to maintain the irreducibly human dimensions of experience that no algorithm can capture. We need what some call “centaur” partnerships: collaborations where machines enumerate patterns while humans exercise judgement, where computation handles the explicit while consciousness navigates the implicit.

This matters urgently now. We stand at a threshold where the pressure to make everything explicit, measurable and machine-readable threatens to eliminate the very qualities that make life worth living. The unsayable is not the enemy of understanding; it is the ground from which all understanding grows, the darkness from which stars become visible, the silence from which music emerges. To forget this is not just an intellectual error. It is to lose contact with the sources of meaning that make existence bearable, beautiful, worth the trouble of consciousness.

Back in A&E, as dawn approached, something shifted. The mother’s hand never stopped its rhythm, but the girl’s breathing had steadied. A junior doctor brought them tea, not because protocol demanded it but because something deeper did. The fluorescent harshness softened somehow, or perhaps we had simply adjusted to it. We were strangers held together by circumstance, yet in that pre-dawn hour, we formed a temporary community of the unsaid, each carrying our private fears while sharing a public vigil.

When they finally found me a bed and wheeled me away, I looked back at the mother and daughter, still waiting, still wordless, still together. The mother caught my eye and nodded, the smallest possible gesture, but in it was everything: acknowledgement, encouragement, the recognition of one human being by another in the midst of uncertainty. No words passed between us. None were needed. We had shared something that no medical record would capture, no satisfaction survey could measure, no quality metric could assess. We had shared presence itself and in that sharing, we had briefly made the unbearable bearable.

This is the knowledge we need most desperately now: not more information, not better explanations, not clearer procedures, but the wisdom that comes from staying present to what cannot be articulated, from protecting what cannot be measured, from valuing what cannot be said. We still have time to remember, to rebuild institutions and practices that honour the full spectrum of human knowledge. But first we must resist the tyranny of explicitness, the demand that everything be brought into language, the fantasy that what cannot be said does not exist.

The unsayable surrounds us, sustains us, connects us. It lives in the pause before we speak, in the gesture that says more than words, in the silence that holds more than any explanation could contain. To honour it is not to retreat from reason but to recognise that reason itself rests on foundations it cannot examine, that the explicit always depends on the implicit, that what we can say is always less than what we know.

In that gap between knowledge and language, between experience and expression, between presence and words, lies everything that makes us human. Guard it carefully. It is more precious than we know and more fragile than we dare admit.

Author’s Note: A brief word of thanks to everyone who has sent kind messages regarding the above A&E visit, which is now nearly two years ago. I’m pleased to report I’m fully recovered and back to overthinking and writing far too much.