Being okay with feeling lost

When you're a kid, the world expects you to be a quick learner. When you grow up, the world expects you to already know. The words "I don't know" are rarely uttered once you grow up, and we substitute true knowledge with unexamined opinions. Why does this happen, and what to do about it?

As a kid, you don't start out by knowing anything, so every knowledge you gain pushes you upward. But once you know enough about something, it's like hitting the local maxima (pardon the machine learning parlance).

In order to learn something else, you first have to climb down the local maxima in order to reach another larger maxima. Thus, when you learn a new subject, you feel lost, and the tendency is to stick to what you already know.

But we're completely fine with our artificial intelligence systems temporarily moving through suboptimal solutions in order to reach a more optimal one. So why not you?