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Proverb: What you don’t know can’t hurt you
So, tell me, have you ever kept a secret?
Come on, I won’t tell anybody, and I won’t write about it here either.
I promise!
What?
You don’t trust me.
Ah, no matter; the purpose of this post is for you to learn something, not me.
The first thing I want to tell you is that sometimes we keep secrets because what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
It’s a proverb and often used when we want to prevent others from worrying about a problem that we have.
See, the idea is that if you don’t know about a problem, you won’t worry about it or be unhappy; in other words, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.
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Let’s imagine you had a minor accident in your car.
Nothing major, of course, just a destroyed bumper and bent chassis – nothing that can’t be fixed.
You delay telling your spouse because knowing that you could have been injured would cause them much stress.
In such a situation, what they don’t know, can’t hurt them, and you have some time to have it fixed before they find out.
Whether you tell them later is up to you. I want to remind you, though, that honesty is the best policy.
Then there are times when you don’t want others to tell you something.
You do this to protect yourself from worry.
Perhaps your daughter is a bit of an adventurer.
She enjoys rock climbing, whitewater rafting and other dangerous sports.
You love her dearly and are also a worrywart.
Even though she wants to tell you all about her adventures, you decline.
What you don’t know can’t hurt you, even though eventually it may hurt her.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 80.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.