The sages had understood it before us: the key to happiness is not what we think. Prepare to be surprised. Severing oneself from all sources of information, in these times, is tempting: guaranteed peace, for a while. But this does not prevent the difficulties to come. Knowing or not knowing? Both are ferments of happiness, in their own way. Good news: if ignorance brings happiness, then happy times are on the horizon! Not a month goes by without a new intelligent friend joining our lives: Google, ChatGPT, Le Chat, DeepSeek give us access to all the world's knowledge and more. Tomorrow, surrounded by tools that can, in a nanosecond, remedy our ignorance, we will swim in an unparalleled happiness. What's the point of wasting time learning how to build an essay, write an official letter, calculate an equation or even prepare a trip when our smartphones do it for us instantly? With hindsight, we can smile at the alarms of 1970s educators who saw the arrival of the first pocket calculators, convinced they would harm the learning of basic operations. What use is acquiring knowledge if it is always accessible, everywhere? Perhaps we must accept that ignorance is, indeed, the beginning of wisdom. The expression comes from an excerpt of an 18th-century English poem: “Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.” Translation: when ignorance brings happiness, why claim knowledge that, on the contrary, would lead to unhappiness? Publilius Syrus, a Latin poet from the early days of our era, already stated: “In nihil sapiendo vita iucundissima est” (“In not knowing anything, life is most delicious”). At the same time, Jesus himself promised happiness to the “simple of heart” (Gospel of Matthew, 5.3). He was not talking about intelligence but innocence, like that of a child who knows nothing but lives joyfully with what is offered to him. After all, if Oedipus had remained in the ignorance of his history, he would have aged peacefully in his palace in Thebes, Jocaste would not have hanged herself, Antigone and her brothers would have spent happy days, and Freud would have had to find another name for his famous complex. It is true that ignorance has many advantages. First, it avoids the frustration of confronting the limits of our knowledge. Then, it allows us to live in a certain peace of mind: no need to worry and torment our minds with anxious thoughts. If I don't know anything about my partner's past love life, I won't get lost in the turmoil of baseless jealousy or pointless comparisons. Ignorance also offers an emotional refuge against the fear of the unknown. Since I don't know, I am not prey to my doubts, my fears or my futile attempts at control. As early as 1670, Pascal warned in his Pensées: The men having been unable to cure death, poverty, ignorance, they have advised themselves to be happy by not thinking about them. In more trivial language: what I don't know cannot make me suffer. Ignorance then becomes a formidable bulwark against impotence, incoherence, absurdity. Up to a certain point... The choice of ignorance, that of the ostrich putting its head in the sand, is obviously an illusion. We believe ourselves to be safe by choosing to ignore the world's distresses and live, as said in Voltaire's Candide, by contenting ourselves with “cultivating our garden.” But we are subject to another form of threat: vulnerability. If I don't know my rights, I expose myself to abuses. If I don't question, I submit to manipulations and disinformations. And if I refuse to know my health status, I risk that it will be too late, when the time comes, to take care of it. Reality always ends up imposing its law. Facing it, ignorance hinders our needs for change. It is not innocent that the greatest dystopian novels like 1984 or Brave New World imagine societies where knowledge is forbidden. In Buddhism, ignorance is one of the three poisons - along with attachment and aversion - that divert man from accessing the four “noble truths”: suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering, the extinction of suffering. And what would psychology be without this certainty that it is by learning to know ourselves that we can change our ways of functioning, our relationship with the world and get out of our existential blockages? Yes, ignorance can make one happy. For a time. Thus, the split and denial are formidable psychological tools to distance ourselves from shocks, traumas, everything that seems impossible to live and feel. For a time. Because our supposed ignorance leads us into an emotional ambivalence made of two opposing feelings: on one hand, an apparent lightness, on the other hand, the latent discomfort of what is not deceived. And this dissonance can be a source of uncomfortable internal tension. It is through curiosity and the “re-recognition” of what we live that we can find the path to balance and security. In his Gai Savoir, Nietzsche thus presupposed that our need for knowledge was “the will to find, among all that is strange, extraordinary, doubtful, something that is no longer for us a subject of anxiety. Would it not be the instinct of fear that incites us to know? Would the jubilation of one who acquires knowledge not be the very jubilation of the feeling of regained security?” If we think about it, the difficulty is certainly not in the antagonism between ignorance and knowledge, as if we had to choose between these two poles. All the more so since we move freely from one to the other. One moment, I want to know; one moment, especially not. In both cases, I am struggling against my impotence to control. The illusion of knowledge plays on making us believe that we would be less vulnerable, fragile if we knew, as if understanding assured us of absolute mastery. We claim that ignorance is happiness but, in fact, it is our greatest anxiety. However, what life would we have if we knew the time this love will last, what will be made of our children's future and the date of our death? And yet: these would only be information. Knowledge, on the other hand, resides in experience: it is by living things that we know them best. Ignorance or knowledge, as often, the balance could be found between the two: admit, without burdening ourselves, our desire to flee certain truths to protect ourselves; and accept that awareness, although painful, can free us and strengthen us. It is through these back-and-forth movements in the ambiguities of our condition as mortals that we may, perhaps, be happy.