The story goes like this: in the garden, there was one tree we weren’t supposed to touch. One bite, and we’d know too much. We bit. We knew. We fell.
Maybe the punishment wasn’t exile or mortality. Maybe it was something quieter and far more persistent: the sense that whatever we learn only widens the perimeter of what we don’t. A hunger that knowledge doesn’t satisfy so much as refine.
A scientist once said, “The more we look, the more we find,” equal parts wonder and warning. We tend to hear progress in that line. We rarely hear the cost. The deeper we go, the more every answer feels like a placeholder. The more we name, the more the seams show. It’s not that the world offers more; it’s that our need for coherence grows faster than our ability to supply it.
Before the fruit, maybe things simply were. After, things had edges. Questions. Fractures we couldn’t unsee. Awareness didn’t just illuminate ignorance—it multiplied it.
And still we can’t stop. We build instruments sensitive enough to detect whispers from the beginning of time, then stare at the data and realize we’ve only uncovered a larger darkness. We chase unifying theories knowing full well that unity is a mirage that recedes as we approach.
Perhaps that was the real promise of the tree: not forbidden knowledge, but the permanent ache for it. A sign that once you taste understanding, you will never again feel whole. You will want to know, and the wanting will outlive every answer.
And we—fools, children, would-be gods—bit anyway.