Ignorancy.

I'm trying to find my PO Box key and cannot find it for the life of me, and I know I'm gonna headdesk when I DO find it because it's gonna be in a place that it was supposed to be easy for me to find - because it was where I put it so I WOULDN'T have this problem when I went on break.

 

I suppose ignorance IS a part of life when you think about it, because our entire existence is built upon loosely shared beliefs and concepts which may not have any basis in what we think of as reality - depending on how philosophical you want to get about it and your personal beliefs about the nature of reality - and even assuming our thoughts and understanding of the world is valid, knowledge on a more detailed level isn't something that we're born with. It's inevitable you'll find people who are unaware of things, and be unaware of things yourself.

...yes, I know that isn't necessarily the context in which the word is being used here, but I'm tired of people using "ignorance" as a dirty word with universally negative connotations...you might say that, ironically, a lot of people are ignorant about the true meaning of ignorance. Mix ignorance with arrogance, or egotism, or a deliberate denial of anything other than one's own perspective, and THEN things become irritating. Ignorance by itself is not especially troublesome though. You might even say that it is the natue of humankind to be ignorant.

 

The first thing I should point out is that 'ignorancy' is not a word; it's just 'ignorance'.
The second thing is that the meaning of ignorance is very simple: it's "the state of not knowing something". That's all it means. It's not the same as stupidity; it's not the same as abrasion; it's not even the same as aggravation - it's just not knowing.

If you as a person do not know of or about something, that means by definition you're ignorant of it. This is, of course, totally natural, since we spend our whole lives just trying to learn new things. You can deal with people who are 'ignorant' all the time - and that's to be expected, because not everyone knows the same things you do. That goes both ways; you don't always know the same things other people do.

We spend our whole lives learning about things, gathering information, processing phrases, drawing connections between them, and so on. As we do, we become gradually less ignorant about things. No one will ever become fully nonignorant, and that's why we have things like books, research materials, and dictionaries on hand. Life is a big journey, and a lot about that journey is learning. Of course, with that journey comes making mistakes, as experience is also a fantastic teacher.

One thing that has become important for me in my pursuit of knowledge is "how will I use that information?" I love learning things and hate being ignorant, so I love to amass more knowledge about pretty much anything I don't know. However, I need to be constructive in that pursuit. If I learn something, my follow-up question is "now what will I do with this information?" for if I just learn something and I have no chance to use that information for myself or for someone else, it's not edifying. Information, like anything else, is a tool, and its efficacy depends on the hands of its wielder. This can apply equally well whether you know something or not - you can know something and yet use it in a horrible way, or you can not know but try your best to put the pieces together based on your limited information.

Knowledge is a neutral property. How you choose to use that is up to you, and there are good and bad ways to use it alike.