Ignorance is bliss meaning | Are you living in blissful ignorance? 😀

The Meaning of Ignorance is Bliss

The meaning of “ignorance is bliss” is similar to the phrase, “What you don’t know, can’t hurt you.”

I’ve found this to be so true in life. It’s often our ignorance that allows us to maintain a state of peaceful bliss.

However, as we grow up we discover more of the world around us. Then, our innocence is lost to painful awareness of life’s curveballs.

“Ignorance is bliss” is harder to understand when you’re young and just starting out in life.

In fact, we may even be offended when someone older scoffs at us, rolls their eyes and says,

“Ignorance is bliss.”

Many really haven’t had enough life experience to truly understand the meaning of “ignorance is bliss.”

In the next few paragraphs, I’ll cover five areas where my ignorance has served as a catalyst for moving forward in life.

You be the judge about whether ignorance really is bliss.

5 Ways Ignorance is Bliss

1. “Ignorance is bliss” in marriage

I find it peculiar when older people give young people advice about how to find the perfect partner.

They say things like, “You shouldn’t marry your partner thinking they will change.” However, the opposite is true, partners do change and will never stop changing.

We are just ignorant to what those changes might turn out to be.

Truth is, if we could see into the future and know what hardships we’ll face in marriage, we would never get married.

Ignorance is bliss in the beginning

We marry someone we love today, completely ignorant to who they will become tomorrow–and for a moment we experience the bliss of innocent love.

Most of us start our marriage knowing the fundamental flaws of our spouse. In this case, we are not completely ignorant.

We know they’ve stretched the truth before to earn our attention.

Or they’re aware we look at life through rose colored glasses.

Maybe they hint that they’re not great with children. We laugh it off and blissfully imagine there’s no way our fun loving partner wouldn’t be a great parent.

But before we marry, these characteristics come across more like “cute quirks.”

If we knew before hand, the full implication of how these flaws may grow into serious relationship hurdles, we might not ever enter marriage.

If we knew about the complete surprises that would come from out of nowhere after 10 years of marriage, we might call it quits before we ever get started.

In marriage, ignorance serves as the catalyst that gets our relationships from point A to point B.

Bottom line, is that we each come into our relationships essentially flawed.

We must be ready to gradually or sometimes suddenly lose our ignorant state of bliss, and accept the responsibility of the commitment we made to that other person.

Or we might just re-enter single life with the blissful ignorance of having forgotten what it’s like to be alone.

2. Ignorance is essential to parenting

Personally, I think parenthood is one of the biggest surprises in life.

The meaning of “ignorance is bliss” is found right at the heart of parenting.

Becoming a parent can quickly turn the highest high you’ve ever known into a painfully crushing blow that knocks the wind right out of your sails.

When a mother and father are expecting their first child, much anticipation builds.

They blissfully whip through the baby aisles at Target and choose the perfect crib, cute baby clothes and every supply you could think of to greet their baby preparedly.

Essentially, parents are initially ignorant to the deeper responsibility of having and raising a child.

Many people without children tend to judge parents when they see how poorly the parents are raising their children.

They say things like,

“People shouldn’t bring children into the world if they aren’t equipped to be parents.”

This is nonsense. Every parent enters parenthood ignorant to the dynamics of having a child.

Yes, it’s blissful to think about a tiny baby wrapped up in a soft and cozy blanket. But it’s our ignorance that fuels this fantasy.

It’s our idea of the blissful love and affection that we think will result from parenthood, which serves as the catalyst to our choice of becoming a parent.

And sometimes, probably quite often, it’s the very bliss of “making a child” that thrusts us into the harsh truth of what it really means to be a “fulltime” parent ’till death do us part.

Raising our children

Another way that ignorance proves to be bliss in parenting is how ignorant we can be about the details of our children’s lives.

Yes, again, there are many haters out there who believe parents should earn a living, run a home, and be completely intimate with every detail of their child’s life all at the same time.

This just isn’t realistic.

Not in my experience, anyway.

Details fall through the cracks. Perhaps subconsciously you allow yourself to remain blissfully ignorant because your child grew up so fast. You still see them as your little girl or boy, not as growing adolescents preparing for adulthood.

If you’re ignorant to your child’s growing lack of innocence, you can maintain the sense of bliss you’d expected of parenthood.

In summary, parenting is one of the challenging aspects of life where it’s difficult to balance ignorance and bliss.

3. “Ignorance is bliss” fuels our career & business

Most of us start a career or create a business because we want to secure our financial future.

We think if we can just climb the ranks at our job or earn that promotion, our future will be set.

Initially, in our ignorance, we believe that working hard is all it takes to make it to the top.

For a few years we toil by the sweat of our brow, day and night. Our hope makes us ignorant to the long road ahead of us.

We can still imagine the blissful state we’ll attain once we earn our promotion or find success in business.

For a long time, our ignorance is bliss.

But as time wanes on, we realize our grit is not enough to move us forward.

Our efforts are dampened by a jaded attitude that slowly steals our joy.

We don’t recognize ourselves in the mirror. We’ve made concessions against the character we had when we were still “innocent” about the business world and corporate America.

In a business setting, unfortunately the opposite is true when it comes to: “What we don’t know, can’t hurt us.”

In fact, it’s all those things we don’t know or fail to learn that will come back to haunt us.

Ignorance keeps us going against all odds

Leaving any stone unturned because we want to remain in a state of blissful ignorance will be a short-lived reality where we’re eventually held responsible for the t’s we didn’t cross and the i’s we didn’t dot.

Then, we ask ourselves, “Is the money worth our effort? Is a secure financial future an oxymoron that we initially approached in complete ignorance of what our dream would demand?”

Ignorance is often the catalyst for getting started in business and working toward promotions that turn out not to have a clear path of success.

Bliss may eventually result in burnout. One must ask themselves if the bliss is worth the tradeoff of a lifelong struggle.

4. The meaning of “ignorance is bliss” in death

Death has long been a mystery that mystics have explored and religions have attempted to demystify. Some religions hope for a blissful heaven at the end of this life. Other religions say that we don’t go anywhere when we die. Life is just suddenly over.

Truth is, no one knows for sure what happens when we die. Many give accounts of near death experiences. Those provide a glimpse into a possible blissful state that may greet us once we take our last breath.

But scientists can refute these claims. They posit that these experiences are just tricks our brain plays on us right before it dies.

Not only do we not know what happens after death, we also don’t know when we’ll die or lose a loved one to death.

Oddly, even after we lose someone we love, somehow we keep living our life.

We remain blissfully ignorant that death could be just around the corner for us too.

So why is ignorance bliss when it comes to the subject of dying?

Quite frankly, I think knowing exactly when someone will die and their conditions of death would change our life expectancy.

Blissful memories we hold dear might not be possible if we were fully aware of the mysteries surrounding death.

So yes, ignorance serves us well. Up until the very moment we experience death, we have hope to take our next breath.

5. Faith – Faith is the substance of things hoped for, evidence of the unseen.

The Bible says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Faith nurtures a sense of blissful ignorance because it allows us to rely on things we don’t see. The tangible isn’t so important when it comes to faith.

Faith is a reliable way to experience bliss. It is through our ignorance of how faith works, that we’re able to take our next step.

If we knew that our faith would result in A, B, or C, we might be tempted to take a different road that’s ends up more detrimental for us.

Faith helps us stay put or move forward when we’re ignorant to what the future holds.

God definitely knew the meaning of “ignorance is bliss” before we did.

Having faith stops us from trying to read into our future and says, it’s o.k. to remain blissfully ignorant in the here and now.

In my opinion, faith is the #1 antidote for being able to handle the overwhelming knowledge the information age affords.

Knowing isn’t always the best route.

So indeed, we often look at blissful ignorance as immature or short-sighted.

But, blissful ignorance might just be what spurs us to take our next step.

Ignorance can help us live with our spouse in the here and now, stop us from hyper-focusing on the mistakes we might make in the future, and drive our business growth, so that our success may even seem like an accident one day.

In summary, blissful ignorance can be a viable way of living life.

After all, according to Christianity it was the “knowledge of good and evil,” that caused our eventual fall.

LoveLifeLinks.com hopes you can consider ignorance as a way to maintain a sense of blissful love in your life.

Remember, you can feel love. Anywhere. Anytime. All the time.