You Don’t Know What You’re Missing (Literally)
Travel, unknown unknowns, and the limits of staying put
“There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we know we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
It is one of the most unintentionally profound quotes ever uttered in a press briefing, and whether Donald Rumsfeld meant it philosophically or not, it absolutely nails something fundamental about travel.
If you never leave the place you were born or grew up, your world is almost entirely made up of known knowns and known unknowns. You know how things work where you live. You know what people are like. You know what success looks like. You also know what you think you don’t know, because television, social media, and headlines have already handed you a pre-packaged version of the rest of the world.
But unknown unknowns?
Those only show up when you actually get out of your comfort zone and physically go somewhere else.
Travel is the fastest and best way I know to discover that large parts of reality were never even on your radar.
When you cross a border, especially one you were taught to think about in abstract terms, something shifts. You stop consuming other people’s interpretations of a place and start forming your own. The smells are different. The rhythm of the day is different. The way people interact, argue, relax, and move through public space is different.
Suddenly, things you assumed were universal turn out to be very local.
And no documentary, podcast, or think piece can replicate that moment when your brain quietly goes, “Oh. I didn’t know this was even a thing.”
That is the unknown unknown revealing itself.
A lot of people wonder whether travel is about liking everything you encounter. It absolutely is not. You will be uncomfortable sometimes. You will disagree with things. You will encounter systems, norms, and ideas that do not align with your own.
Many of us are perfectly content to only expose ourselves to people who think, act, and value the same things we do; that’s human nature. That is not a failure of travel. That is the point.
Since the dawn of time humans have sought out the familiar, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong, however, is limiting your entire world and life to that. If you only ever seek out places that perfectly mirror your existing beliefs, you are not expanding your worldview. You are just reinforcing it, albeit with better scenery.
Travel does not promise comfort. It promises contrast.
And contrast is what sharpens perspective.
There is also something deeply grounding about realizing how much of what you “know” was never firsthand. When you are at home, your opinions are often assembled from secondhand material. Someone else’s outrage. Someone else’s fear. Someone else’s framing.
When you are on the ground, those borrowed narratives start to fall apart.
You start to notice the ordinary humanity underneath the abstractions. People going to work. People laughing. People annoyed about the same mundane things you are annoyed about. Life continuing, regardless of how dramatic it looks from the outside.
That realization tends to make you a little humbler and a lot more curious.
Which, frankly, is a pretty great trade.
Will you come home with neat and crystal-clear answers? Rarely. More often, you come home with better questions. Questions about why things are done the way they are. Questions about what you were taught to assume. Questions about whether your way is the only way, or even the best way.
That is what happens when unknown unknowns become known. Your mental map of the world gets bigger, messier, and more interesting.
You do not need to agree with everything you encounter. You just need to encounter it honestly.
Because living entirely inside someone else’s version of the world is easy. Shaping your own understanding takes effort, movement, and a willingness to be wrong sometimes.
And yes, that can be uncomfortable.
But it also makes life richer, sharper, and far more real.