You Don’t Know S#!t (And Neither Do I)

Doc Rain
3 hours ago
7 min read

So I’m minding my business on social media. Someone I follow posts a picture of a pay stub. The guy makes a few thousand dollars. By the time taxes come out, healthcare comes out, and then several support payment deductions hit the check, this man is walking away with a couple hundred dollars.

A couple hundred dollars.

Now my brain does what my brain does. It starts asking questions. Not flexing. Not judging. Just genuine curiosity.

So I drop a comment. Something like: there has to be a maximum percentage they can take, right? That can’t be right. Simple question. Honest question.

And then she appeared.

A paralegal, self-identified, came into my comments with her whole chest and informed me, and I’m being generous with the paraphrase, that I didn’t know a thing about the law and should probably stop talking.

Not “actually here’s how it works.”

Not “good question, it’s complicated.”

Just: sit down. You don’t know anything.

I asked her why she was being so rude. She didn’t answer that.

Now. Here’s the part where I have to pause and tell you something. Something I didn’t tell her.

I’m an attorney.

A paralegal told an attorney that she didn’t know anything about the law. And honestly? I had to sit with that for a second because it’s both deeply annoying and also kind of hilarious. But more than anything it made me think. Because that interaction is happening everywhere, every single day, at every level. And we need to talk about it.

WE STOPPED KNOWING WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

I want to introduce you to something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Now stay with me because I’m not about to give you a lecture. Picture us at a dinner table. Somebody passes the snow crab legs and I say: “You know, I was thinking about this research I came across. There’s this thing that happens in people’s brains where the less you actually know about something, the more confident you feel about it.

And the more you truly know, the more aware you become of everything you still don’t understand.”

That’s Dunning-Kruger.

In plain English: the people who know the least are often the loudest. And the people who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding something are usually the ones saying “well, it’s actually more complicated than that.”

We are living in the golden age of Dunning-Kruger.

People who haven’t cracked a biology textbook since ninth grade are out here arguing with infectious disease researchers.

People who did a two hour deep dive on YouTube are telling immunologists what they got wrong.

People who have never studied law, policy, economics, psychology, or anything else with sustained serious attention are absolutely certain they know more than the people who have.

And they will fight you about it. Loudly. Publicly. With zero shame.

And I want to be careful here because I am definitely not saying trust everything and question nothing.

Institutions have lied to us.

Corporations have prioritized profit over people.

The government has a history, a long and documented one, of not having our best interests at mind. Healthy skepticism is not stupidity.

Sometimes the expert is wrong. Sometimes the researcher is bought. Those things are real.

But there is a canyon of difference between thoughtful questioning and loud ignorance performing as truth.

Between “I have concerns about this and here’s why” and “you don’t know what you’re talking about” said by someone who has never sat with the complexity of the thing for a single serious hour.

We lost that distinction somewhere. And it’s costing us.

THE COMMENT SECTION AS A MIRROR

Go back to that pay stub post with me for a second. Because it wasn’t just the paralegal. The whole comment section was something else. People calling this man irresponsible. Making jokes. Reducing him to a punchline about his personal life. Someone said, and this is a real comment: “that’s what happens when you can’t keep it in your pants.”

We don’t know this man. We don’t know his story.

One person, just one, pointed out that it could be one child with arrears. A court pattern based on old income. A situation far more complicated than any of us could see from a pay stub screenshot.

But knowing wasn’t the point.

The performance was the point.

And that’s what I keep coming back to. Because social media has become a stage. And on this stage we perform expertise we don’t have. Certainty we haven’t earned. And judgment we have no business delivering.

We perform happiness. We perform wisdom. We perform spirituality. We perform strength. And underneath all that performance, if you get quiet enough to feel it, is something that aches.

Loneliness.

Real, deep, untended loneliness. The kind that makes you reach for your phone in the middle of the night because you have something to say. But because the silence is too loud.

The kind that makes a stranger’s comment section feel like the one place you have any power. The kind that turns a simple question about a pay stub into an opportunity to make someone feel small so you can feel, just for a moment, like you’re something.

Hurt people hurt people. That’s not a cliché. That’s some real honest truth.

WHERE THIS COMES FROM

Here’s what I want us to sit with. The paralegal who came for me in those comments. The person arguing with the researcher. The keyboard thug in every thread you’ve ever scrolled through…they didn’t arrive here randomly.

Behavior has a root system.

Think about it. If you have spent your entire life being spoken to with contempt. Being dismissed. Being talked over. Being told your questions were stupid and your voice didn’t matter. That becomes the water you swim in. That becomes what communication looks like to you.

You cannot give what you have never received. You can’t model what was never modeled for you.

Maybe the paralegal who told me I didn’t know anything about the law has been talked to that way her whole life.

Maybe nobody ever answered her questions with patience or warmth.

Maybe she learned that the way you establish yourself in a conversation is to come in swinging before someone swings at you.

I don’t know her story. And I’m not excusing the behavior. But I am saying that cruelty always has a history.

And here’s where colonization enters the room, because it always does.

We were systematically taught to compete instead of collaborate.

To hoard what we know instead of share it.

To measure our worth against each other instead of building with each other.

Those are not natural human instincts. Those are modern human creation’s.

And social media didn’t create that dynamic. It just gave it a megaphone and an audience.

Ubuntu says: I am because you are. Which means… when I negate you. When I scroll past you. And ignore you. When I show up in your comments to perform “superiority” instead of share knowledge, I am not winning. I am practicing smallness. I am rehearsing my own disconnection.

And we are all getting very, very good at disconnecting.

BUT STILL. ACCOUNTABILITY HAS TO ENTER THE ROOM.

Here’s where I have to be honest with you because I’m a whole clinician. And I can’t just leave you in the wound without pointing toward the work.

Understanding why you are the way you are is necessary.

It is also not sufficient.

If you have never been shown respect, that is not your fault.

If you learned that the way to survive a conversation is to dominate it, I understand how you got there.

But at some point, somewhere along the road, most of us have witnessed something different.

We have seen someone speak with kindness and still hold their ground.

We have seen someone ask a question without shame and receive an answer that changed them.

We have seen, even briefly, what it looks like when people actually communicate. Instead of perform.

And in that moment, something becomes possible. A choice.

Maybe that choice looks like picking up a book on communication.

Maybe it’s learning and healing from some podcast.

Maybe it’s sitting across from a therapist and doing the uncomfortable work of understanding your patterns.

Maybe it’s just pausing before you type something in a comment section and asking yourself: am I sharing something or am I swinging at something?

We cannot keep handing our unhealed wounds to strangers on the internet and call it conversation. We cannot keep performing expertise we don’t have and calling it confidence. We cannot keep scrolling past the people we claim to love. Watching them build something beautiful, and staying silent. And then wonder why community feels hollow.

The silence is communication. The scroll-past is communication. What we choose not to do out here is just as loud as what we do.

SO HERE’S MY QUESTION

Who are you being when nobody’s watching but everybody can see? Because behind every cruel comment, every performance, every need to make a stranger feel small, there is a wound.

You think the screen hides you.

But those of us who have done the work recognize it every time. That’s not confidence coming through your keyboard. That’s heartbreak looking for somewhere to land.

Trust. I don’t have all the answers. I know what I know, and I say that with full awareness that there is so much I still don’t.

But I know that curiosity is an act of courage.

I know that a question is not a weakness.

I know that the person who says “I don’t fully understand this, help me understand it” is not less than the person performing certainty they’ve never earned.

And I know that we are lonelier than we have ever been. More connected and more isolated at the same time. And that underneath all the noise in every comment section is a human being who wants, more than anything, to be seen without being destroyed for it.

We can do better than this. I really believe that. Not because I’m naive… but because I’ve seen it.