Chasing Omniscience: One Seeker’s Lifelong Quest for Knowledge
Why It’s More About Connection Than Ego
Omniscience is a word with baggage. It conjures images of gods or superheroes, of omnipotent AI models or even that self aggrandizing know-it-all friend. Culturally, to claim all-knowingness is a taboo practice of wisdom reserved for deities; or of hubris in Bond villains. By definition, omniscience describes the capacity to know everything knowable when it needs to be known. It’s possessing information and sharing it openly without need for recognition. Omniscient knowledge is pure exactly because it’s present only when needed.
Calling someone a know-it-all rarely is received as a compliment. Yet for me, seeking omniscience is a path toward righteousness. It challenges my weakness as an Enneagram 5 towards avarice, often translated as greed. This isn’t about hoarding things, it’s about hoarding energy, knowledge, privacy, or information. It’s about seeking wisdom and understanding to add to my inner collection of thoughts.
I know this dance between hording and sharing information and resources well. I use the phrase “chasing omniscience” in my own life as a reminder to repurpose the insatiable pull to understand and keep every bit of knowledge to myself. For me, it’s less about knowing it all and more about knowing deeply and seeking ways to enrich others. It’s omniscience reimagined: not a claim of godlike certainty, but a personal quest for expansive understanding, driven by curiosity and a desire to connect. It’s my journey to get out of my head and into my life.
The Many Faces of Omniscience in Modern Life
The idea of omniscience looms large in our collective imagination. In religion, it sits on a divine pedestal. The monotheistic God is all-knowing, a being for whom nothing is hidden. Human knowledge, by contrast, is understood to be forever partial—one reason the word omniscient applied to a person can sound either ironic or presumptuous. Pop culture plays with the concept in intriguing ways. We have literary devices like the omniscient narrator in novels, an unseen voice that knows every character’s thoughts and each twist of the plot. We have oracles and prophets in myth: Cassandra, for instance, was granted knowledge of future events—a kind of cursed omniscience. Her foresight was absolute, but no one believed her warnings, driving her to despair. The message in her story is poignant: knowledge that finds no listener can become a burden. It’s a theme echoed in countless tales of all-seeing wizards or hyper-intelligent AI in science fiction—having unlimited knowledge often leads not to happiness but to isolation or overload.
In today’s world, we exist in a place in time where omniscience is literally in the palm of our hands. Tech prophets speculate about god-like AI models with omniscient data access that might one day know everything about everyone. Yet, an algorithm could scrape up all the data in the world and still lack true understanding or wisdom. That we use omniscience in the context of AI at all shows our fascination with the idea of all-knowing entities.
Given all this, to speak of chasing omniscience personally might sound quixotic or egotistical. I smile wryly even writing the phrase. I’m fully aware that omniscience in its literal sense is impossible for a single human. And frankly, I wouldn’t want it—Cassandra’s fate, among others, is a cautionary tale. But when I use that phrase to describe my own drive, I mean something more humble: a lifelong chase not of everything, but of as much truth and insight as I can grasp, always knowing it will be a fraction of the whole. It’s an acknowledgement that the word omniscience is too big for me or any of us—yet it’s also an aspiration toward a horizon of understanding that forever recedes. I’ll never get there, but the chase itself is where meaning lives.
The Investigator’s Hunger for Knowledge
Psychologically, this quest is deeply rooted in who I am. In the Enneagram typology I am a Five, often called “The Investigator” or “The Observer.” Type Fives are defined by their hunger for knowledge and their need to feel capable. According to the Enneagram Institute, Fives’ key motivations include a desire to possess knowledge, understand the environment, and have everything figured out as a way of defending the self from threats. Our basic fear is being useless or helpless, and our basic desire is to be competent and able. It’s no surprise, then, that I found solace and identity in learning. As a child, I was the one forever asking “Why?”. By adolescence, I had transformed into the kid forever soaking up worlds of information. Knowledge was my shield. If I could understand how the world works, perhaps I wouldn’t be caught off guard or found lacking. Each new fact was another tool in my belt, a small bulwark against the chaos of not-knowing.
There’s an intensity to this intellectual appetite. I spent decades focused on accumulating information and often detaching from social life in order to feed my curiosity. For as long as I remember, I was chasing a personal omniscience—reading, listening, and watching anything that promised answers. At the time, it felt virtuous, even holy, to devote myself to understanding big ideas. I was emulating, in a way, the archetype of the sage on the mountain: the wise old hermit who withdraws from society to gain insight.
Yet there’s a dark side to the Investigator’s journey. Enneagram Type Fives, for all their brilliance, can become isolated and experience deep loneliness and isolation during their insatiable quest for knowledge. I didn’t go off the deep end, but I did feel the edges of that isolation. The more I learned, the more I also became painfully aware of how little I knew. A certain loneliness grew in me. I had oceans of thoughts and facts in my head, but few people to share them with. In my eagerness to absorb knowledge, I had overlooked something essential: knowledge’s true purpose. Knowledge for its own sake can be delightful, but taken to an extreme, I found it could become a jealously guarded, ultimately sterile prison. I started to question: was I collecting ideas to feel superior or safe? Or was I seeking insight that could genuinely enrich life, mine and others’?
Turning Knowledge into Connection
This self-questioning marked a turning point. I began to understand that my pursuit of “omniscience” had to evolve. The treasure trove of information I’d amassed wasn’t meant to stay locked away in my brain. I needed to step into life. Slowly, I did. I started writing and speaking about what fascinated me, not to show off but to share the wonder. I discovered the joy of a long conversations with friends and family, where my random archive of facts and theories could illuminate our understanding of each other. I learned to let myself not just be the collector of knowledge, but a conduit for it. In educational circles there’s a saying: knowledge grows when shared. I found this to be true—the more I taught or simply discussed what I was learning, the more my own understanding deepened. Paradoxically, by giving away knowledge, I felt less of the nagging scarcity that had driven me to hoard it.
One helpful framework for me was the idea that knowledge can transform into wisdom through connection and reflection. Carl Jung, ever the champion of inner work, famously wrote, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” I interpret that as a call to integrate knowledge internally and personally—to let it change you—rather than just stockpiling facts from the outside. I started to balance my reading with more introspection and with real-world engagement. Instead of hiding behind information, I practice being present with people. I can even be comfortable if I don’t have all the answers—another opportunity to learn. I found that listening requires a different kind of knowing—an attunement to emotion and subtext. This was humbling at first, but ultimately rewarding. My relationships are richer; my world, more connected.
Interestingly, as I opened up, I noticed a shift in how others responded to my “Investigator” tendencies. What once might have come across as aloof intellectualism began to be received as thoughtful curiosity. When I spoke from a place of wanting to help or enlighten, rather than to be right, people listened. I wasn’t Cassandra shouting prophecies to deaf ears; I was more like a friend who’d read an obscure manual and could lend a pertinent fact or detail to someone in need. There is a quiet love in that act of sharing knowledge. It says: I cared enough to learn this, and now I care enough about you to offer it. In those moments, the pursuit of knowledge became a bridge between souls, not a wall.
Toward a Generous Wisdom
The Enneagram teaches that at their healthiest, Type Fives move from detachment to confident engagement. I’ve come to see the truth of that. The highest expression of my “omniscience quest” isn’t in winning Jeopardy!. It’s in synthesizing what I learn into something meaningful for others. It’s in wisdom, which is so much more than information. Wisdom involves empathy, timing, and judgement—it’s knowledge applied with love.
In modern terms, I see acts of knowledge-sharing all around that inspire me to continue the journey in a healthy way. The collaborative spirit of the internet (at its best) reflects this: millions writing content so anyone can learn about anything. It’s a rebuke to the notion that knowledge must be guarded. My younger self’s chase for omniscience was partly about shoring up my own worth, but a more mature chase is about contributing to a greater whole. It’s knowledge as a form of generosity. Every time I share a thought in an article like this, or even recommend a favorite book to someone, I am practicing that generosity.
Will I ever catch omniscience? Of course not. The horizon of knowledge will always stretch out of reach. But that’s liberating. It means I can forever remain a student, a beautifully modest stance to hold. It means there will always be more to learn from others, from the world, from the endless depths of art, science, and human experience. And crucially, it means I will always have something to give, as long as I keep learning. The writer T.S. Eliot posed a famous question: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?” In my own life, I’ve learned that wisdom appears when knowledge is transformed by love—when the goal is not to have and hold, but to illuminate and uplift.
Chasing omniscience, in the end, isn’t about reaching a godlike state of knowing it all. It’s about the chase itself—the lifelong journey of learning deeply and living fully, then turning toward others and saying, “Hey, look at what I found—does this help you too?” In that vulnerable offering, knowledge becomes more than power. It becomes connection. It becomes kindness. And maybe that is a kind of omniscience worth striving for: a state of knowing, however incomplete, that our understanding is in service of something greater than ourselves.