Not knowing is the meal ticket to happiness

By Larry Persily

I’ve been thinking, maybe I am wrong — about a lot of things. I’ve certainly been wrong about many things in life, so perhaps I should broaden my outlook and accept that I don’t have to be so well informed about everything.

Maybe knowing less would lead to a happier life. Maybe many people, myself included, would have fewer things to worry about the less we know.

I always thought that having more information was a good thing. Knowing the data helped figure out whether there was a problem and how bad it was. Knowing the facts made for better decisions.

But I could be wrong. The country is changing, and I suppose I should change with it. 

Fewer facts are better, says the Trump administration. Maybe they are on to something.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Sept. 20 that it was terminating the nationwide Household Food Security reports. These annual reports, which started in the 1990s, helped state and federal officials, food banks and donor programs determine where help was needed the most and whether it was doing any good.

Not so, the department said. “These redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous studies do nothing more than fearmonger.”

I think people without enough food to eat still will be fearful, but the rest of us will be able to rest easier, not needing to fear what we don’t know.

The latest report from last September counted about 18 million U.S. households as “food insecure” at some time during 2023, a million more than in 2022. Food insecure is a Department of Agriculture bureaucratic term, which, in plain English, means someone doesn’t have enough to eat and doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from.

Those 18 million households cover an estimated 47 million Americans.

In 2023, the Department of Agriculture reported that an estimated 13.8 million children lived in households that struggled to get enough food. That’s the most in nearly a decade, according to the 2023 survey results released last fall. Numbers from 2024 will be released next month. After that, the dinner plate will be empty. No more servings of survey data. The department is closing down the information kitchen.

It got me thinking about a better life, or at least an easier and less stressful life, the less I know. Not just me, but the roughly 290 million Americans who were not counted as food insecure in the last survey. As for those 47 million people who are not sure about their next meal, well, they know who they are, so why do the rest of us need to know.

So why stop at shutting down information about the hungry. The government could stop collecting and reporting data on crime. What we don’t know won’t hurt us, unless we are the victim of crime.

And why bother reporting the national debt. Congress doesn’t do anything about it anyway. If we are not reminded about the trillions of dollars on the federal government’s credit cards, we can relax and not care how much government spends.

No need for the U.S. Department of Transportation to report statistics on lost luggage by the airlines. That’s just too much heavy baggage for my mind.

And maybe we should just discontinue the U.S. Census. Elected leaders can’t agree on who should be counted anyway. It’d be one less thing to argue about.

Ignorance is bliss, unless you’re hungry.

• Larry Persily is the publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel, which originally published this column.