I sometimes wonder if there’s anyone who truly understands everything about cars.
Cars are incredibly complicated.
Just understanding the materials they’re made of is a huge challenge. Then those materials become individual components, and those components come together to form a complete vehicle. Trying to understand every mechanism at work in that finished product is almost overwhelming.
A human lifetime is simply too short.
You often hear people say,
“Ever since I started driving on race tracks, I stopped speeding on public roads.”
I think that’s because they experienced firsthand just how difficult it is to control a car.
If you keep practicing seriously on the track, your driving skills will definitely improve.
And yet, many people become less willing to drive fast on public roads. They begin to see public roads as dangerous.
That’s because they gain a much clearer understanding of where the limits of their control actually are.
The more you learn, the more aware you become of your own limitations.
I think the same is true when it comes to knowledge.
Cars are difficult.
There’s no doubt about that.
But at the same time, I’ve often found that each individual mechanism isn’t nearly as difficult as I first imagined.
Of course, some topics are genuinely hard to understand.
But many others can be understood if you build the necessary fundamentals, receive a proper explanation, and put in the effort to learn.
And when you finally understand them, you often find yourself thinking,
“Oh… that’s actually much simpler than I thought.”
That happens more often than you might expect.
The problem is that there are just so many of them.
Far too many.
The knowledge required to understand one phenomenon might be something you learned in elementary school.
Or it might require high school physics at the level used in university entrance exams.
Recently, while researching springs, I ended up looking at that kind of physics.
“Wait… this is considered fundamental?”
I remember staring at the problems, realizing I couldn’t solve them.
When you don’t understand one thing, you have to study the fundamentals behind it.
Then you discover you don’t understand those fundamentals either, so you have to go one level deeper.
Only by repeating that process do you gradually begin to understand.
In some fields, there are high school students who know far more than I do.
But that’s simply reality.
There are still far too many things I don’t understand.
Too much knowledge I still need to acquire.
And compared to all of that, the time we’re given is far too short.
Maybe that’s exactly what makes it so fascinating.
When I browse the internet, I often come across articles that sound completely certain about everything.
Meanwhile, professional racing drivers are the ones saying,
“I still have a long way to go.”
And there are also people who stopped driving fast on public roads after experiencing track driving.
The more you learn, the more clearly you begin to see what you don’t know—and where your own limits are.
I’ve come to feel that the process of understanding something is also the process of discovering what you don’t yet understand.
It’s something I never realized when I was younger.
Back then, I truly didn’t understand anything.
Not that I understand much now, either…
As I gradually become more aware of what I don’t understand, the bigger picture—which used to be little more than a blur—has slowly begun to come into focus.
Since then, the way I see myself has changed a little.