I’ve often felt like this. There are a couple of topics that I definitely have a depth of knowledge in – classical music, music theory, chess, Doctor Who, Undertale – but really, I just know very little about a lot of things.

  I know that I am a smart person. I don’t go round saying it, because that’s not a very smart thing to do – yet here I am proclaiming it in a public internet blog. I was a “gifted kid” in the “accelerated program” at my school growing up. I am usually my friends’ number one source of information when they don’t know something.

  My friends are all quite smart people, when it comes to their specialties. But the other day, one of them asked, “Who’s George Washington? Like, why is he important?” I was dumbstruck. One of my friends didn’t know one of the most important figures in American History. Mind you, we are from Australia, but the history of the American Revolution is quite important even to us, because the Revolution is the main reason that European Convicts were sent to Australia, and they then interfered the Indigenous Population for years to come. It’s important to know the history so that we know how to make things better for everyone. And it doesn’t help that this person is also a theatre person and would have listened to Hamilton, in which George Washington has quite a big role.

  However, upon discussing this with my Dad, he made the point that it’s not actually that important to know who George Washington was. I thought, “This is ridiculous. Of course it’s important to know who George Washington was.” But then he said, “The only reason it’s important to know who George Washington was is because Americans think that’s important and will get angry at you if you don’t know.”

  Sherlock Holmes famously didn’t know that the Earth orbited the Sun. It wasn’t important to him. There are many things that I don’t think are important to me, so I don’t bother learning about them. The Kardashians? Nope. Don’t care, haven’t learnt about them. So maybe George Washington isn’t as important as I thought.