Is Ignorance Bliss? Why Competence Is the Key to Happiness.

The trope of the “kindhearted simpleton” is well established in American culture. Sometimes referred to as “Dumb Is Good” by television insiders, characters who fit the trope range from Forrest Gump, to Woody from Cheers to every movie in the Ernest Goes franchise. Each iteration reinforces the idea that the emptier the head, the happier the person — that ignorance is a convenient shortcut to bliss.

The phrase “ignorance is bliss” can be traced all the way back to the 1747 poem “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” But it’s a misunderstood work; poet Thomas Gray is reflecting on the lost innocence of childhood, not the delight of being an ignorant adult. You could say the long-standing fallacy that ignorance and bliss are intertwined is based on our collective inability to interpret 18th-century poetry.

Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that we’re getting dumber. IQ scores have been plummeting since the 1970s, literacy rates have declined in recent years and many people who can read no longer bother with it. Despite this uptick in ignorance, bliss is conspicuously missing. Depression rates have increased significantly since 2017, doubling in those adults under the age of 30. No matter how dumb we become, the happiness that was supposed to follow is nowhere to be found.

Competence Is Bliss

If ignorance isn’t bliss, what is? We can turn our attention to another theory of well-being, which has held up in decades of psychological research: self-determination theory, or SDT.

Developed in the 1970s by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, SDT introduced the idea that people aren’t exclusively driven by external rewards or punishment. Ryan and Deci’s research examined the internal motivations of individuals and settled on three basic needs that are crucial for mental health: autonomy, relatedness and, crucially, competence.

Unlike other theories that cannot always be proven across multiple studies, self-determination theory has been demonstrated consistently in the data for decades. “It only continues to gather steam,” says clinical psychologist Susan Whitbourne, Ph.D., a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Autonomy is the ability to exercise free will over one’s behavior. Relatedness is your capacity for connection with others. Whitbourne describes competence, meanwhile, as feeling effective at what you do and living with a sense of purpose.

“Competence is a significant factor influencing identity. We need to feel competent,” she explains. “The theory suggests that the opposite of ignorance is bliss.” This type of competence goes beyond shallow recognition in the workplace, such as praise or promotion. “The data would suggest that you will have a shallow existence if all you’re doing is kind of working for those extrinsic rewards,” Whitbourne says.

Do You Have “Shortcut Syndrome”? Here’s How to Fix It.

Our simple antidote to frictionless living: do hard things

Offloading Competence

If competence leads to happiness, we should all start competence-maxxing…right? In the digital age, it’s not that simple. For example, learning how to keep up with new technologies can increase your competence; but relying on tools like AI for writing emails and other basic intellectual tasks can lead to cognitive offloading, which diminishes competence.

“Replacing the exercise of your own intellectual competence creates an alienation from yourself,” Whitbourne says. “A lot of what the self-determination theory is about is connecting with your true self.” To stretch that thought out: delegating too much competence to AI might make us even more miserable.

To be fair, not all cognitive offloading is bad. According to Michael Ardoline, an assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University who studies the ethics of technology, some offloading allows people to build a type of “scaffold we can depend on that frees us up to develop more important, interesting or useful competencies.”

But the problem is when people come to rely on certain technologies like Google or ChatGPT, and then the quality of these platforms erodes over time (conveniently after all their competitors no longer exist). There’s a fun new term for this: enshittification, which was coined by tech journalist Cory Doctorow. This forces people to rely on a lower-quality product than they started with. As Ardoline puts it, “If that scaffolding degrades, it’s likely that our abilities will be undermined or degrade along with it.”

He’s echoed by his peer, Edward Lenzo, a visiting assistant professor at Muhlenberg College. “The loss of competency can happen without our noticing,” he says. Smartphones and digital devices are designed to hijack our attention away and prevent us from looking inward. As a result, most of us overlook how declining technology is impacting us.

The One Variable You Control

Lenzo and Ardoline point out that history’s greatest philosophers didn’t believe ignorance was bliss either. From Kantian deontology, to Vedic and Buddhist darshanas, to Socrates famously claiming that the unexamined life is not worth living, thinkers across traditions have agreed that the cultivation of competence is crucial to living a good life.

Virtue ethics makes this especially concrete. The theory contends that no one is born a good or bad person — people develop habits and competencies over time that make them more or less capable of flourishing.

“If you have cultivated virtues to a high enough degree, you will do the right thing at the right time in the right way, and you will do it like it’s second nature,” Ardoline explains. “Aristotle also argued that if you have the virtues, then you are more likely to live a flourishing or happy life.” The link between well-being and competence, in other words, is “one of the oldest ideas in ethics.”

Granted, adding “competencies” to an already packed life is a tall order. And competence is only one piece of the puzzle; autonomy and relatedness are also crucial for well-being. But job security can evaporate, and relationships can strain and even end. There is a comfort and control inherent to competence — you can almost always find something to build on.

Meet your guide

Lauren Vinopal

Lauren Vinopal is a writer based in Chicago. She specializes in reporting expert-driven fitness, nutrition and mental health content, as well as the intersection between wellness and culture. Her work has been featured in Fatherly, Mel Magazine, Slate, Vice, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, GQ, Psychology Today, and more.