Imagine that you are afraid. You have reason to be. You are afraid of yourself. You are afraid of other people. You are afraid of the world. You are nostalgic for the innocence of the past; for the time before you learned the terrible things that shattered the trust characterizing your childhood. The knowledge you have gained of yourself, other people, and the world has embittered more than enlightened. You have been betrayed, hurt, and disappointed. You have become distrustful even of hope itself, as your hope has been repeatedly shattered (and that is the very definition of hopelessness). The last thing you want is to know more. Better to leave what is enshrouded in mystery. Better, as well, to avoid thinking too much (or at all) about what could be. When ignorance is bliss, after all, it is folly to be wise.↵
Imagine, more precisely, that you are so afraid that you will not allow yourself even to know what you want. Knowing would simultaneously mean hoping, and your hopes have been dashed. You have your reasons for maintaining your ignorance. You are afraid, perhaps, that there is nothing worth wanting; you are afraid that if you specify what you want precisely you will simultaneously discover (and all too clearly) what constitutes failure; you are afraid that failure is the most likely outcome; and, finally, you are afraid that if you define failure and then fail, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was you that failed, and that it was your fault.

So, you do not allow yourself to know what you want. You manage this by refusing to think it through. You are happy, satisfied, and engaged sometimes and unhappy, frustrated, and nihilistic other times, but you will not inquire deeply into why, because then you would know, and then you would encounter yet-again shattered hope and confirmed disappointment. You are also afraid, but for different reasons, to allow others to know what you want. First, if they were to find out what you wanted, then they might tell you, and then you would know, even if you were fighting against gathering that very knowledge. Second, if they knew, they could then deny you what you truly wanted, even needed, and hurt you much more efficiently than they might if your deepest desires (and, therefore, your vulnerabilities) remained secret.

The fog that hides is the refusal to notice—to attend to—emotions and motivational states as they arise, and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you. A bad mood signifies something. A state of anxiety or sadness signifies something, and not likely something that will please you to discover. The most probable outcome of successfully articulating an emotion that has accrued without expression over time is tears—an admission of vulnerability and pain which are also feelings that people do not like to allow, particularly when they are feeling distrustful and angry. Who wants to dig down into the depths of pain and grief and guilt until the tears emerge? And voluntary refusal to take notice of our emotional states is not the only impediment to dealing with them. If your wife or husband or whomever else you are tangled up with, unhappily, at the moment says something that comes too close to the painful truth, for example, then a sharp and insulting remark will often shut them up—and is therefore very likely to be offered. This is partly a test: does the person being insulted care enough about you and your suffering to dig past a few obstacles and unearth the bitter truth? It is also partly, and more obviously, defensive: if you can chase someone away from something you do not want to discover, that makes your life easier in the present. Sadly, it is also very disappointing if that defense succeeds, and is typically accompanied by a sense of abandonment, loneliness, and self-betrayal. You must nonetheless still live among other people, and they with you. And you have desires, wants, and needs, however unstated and unclear. And you are still motivated to pursue them, not least because it is impossible to live without desire, want, and need.

So, what might you do—what should you do—as an alternative to hiding things in the fog? Admit to your feelings. This is a very tricky matter and it does not simply mean give in to them. First, noting, much less communicating, feelings of anger or pain due to lonesomeness, or anxiety about something that might be trivial, or jealousy that is likely unwarranted is embarrassing. The admission of such feelings is a revelation of ignorance, insufficiency, and vulnerability. Second, it is unsettling to allow for the possibility that your feelings, however overwhelming and convincing, might be misplaced and, in your ignorance, pointing you in the wrong direction. It is possible that you have misinterpreted the situation entirely, for reasons of which you remain fundamentally unconscious. It is for such reasons that trust is vital: but trust of the mature and tragic sort. A naive person trusts because he or she believes that people are essentially or even universally trustworthy. But any person who has truly lived has been—or has—betrayed.