Everything Is Uncertain

"People are afraid of uncertainty but everything is uncertain. If you think anything in your life is certain, you are kind of being naive."
(from my tweets, 2015)

When I wrote that, I was in the middle of years where almost nothing about my future was settled. I was trying things that might not work, with no guarantee of when, or whether, they would pay off. Around the same time I tweeted: "It all starts out with a basic courage to try significant things. Just basic. That is what most people don't have."

Looking back, I think the courage I was talking about was mostly courage in the face of not knowing. And it turns out that "not knowing" is one of the most studied, and most misunderstood, sources of human stress.

Not knowing can be worse than bad news

In 2016, researchers at University College London, led by Archy de Berker, ran an experiment that sounds unpleasant but taught us something important. Participants played a game where they turned over rocks on a screen, some of which hid a snake. When a snake appeared, they got a mild electric shock. The odds changed throughout the game, so sometimes people could predict a shock and sometimes they couldn't.

People's stress levels, measured by sweat, pupil size and their own reports, were highest not when a shock was almost certain, but when it was most uncertain. Not knowing whether something bad would happen was more stressful than knowing it would.

That helps explain why uncertainty feels so heavy. Our minds would often rather have bad news than no news.

When fear of the unknown takes over

Psychologists have a name for how strongly someone reacts to the unknown: intolerance of uncertainty. In a 2016 review, psychologist Nicholas Carleton described it as a core ingredient in many forms of anxiety. People high in intolerance of uncertainty tend to see ambiguous situations as threatening, worry more, and avoid situations where they can't predict the outcome.

The problem is that, as I tweeted, almost everything is uncertain. Your health, your job, your relationships, the economy. If we wait for certainty before we act, we wait forever. And avoidance tends to make the fear grow, because we never get to learn that we can handle the unknown.

The surprising upside of not knowing

Here's the twist. Uncertainty isn't only a source of stress. Sometimes it's a source of joy.

In 2005, Timothy Wilson, Daniel Gilbert and their colleagues ran a set of studies on what they called the pleasures of uncertainty. In one study, people received an unexpected kindness, a card with a dollar coin attached, from a stranger. Some cards clearly explained who had sent the gift and why. Others were vague. The people who received the vague, uncertain version stayed in a good mood longer. Their minds kept returning to the mystery, and so they kept reliving the pleasant surprise.

Uncertainty, it turns out, keeps our attention engaged, and that can work in either direction. It can keep us worrying, or it can keep us wondering. A lot depends on what we choose to focus on.

What the philosophers said

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote an entire book about this feeling, The Concept of Anxiety (1844). He described anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom." For Kierkegaard, the unease we feel when facing an open future isn't a sign that something is wrong. It's the feeling of having real choices. It's the price of being free.

Aristotle offered a practical way to think about how to act within that freedom. In the Nicomachean Ethics (Book III), he described courage as a middle path between two extremes: cowardice, which avoids every risk, and rashness, which ignores real dangers. The courageous person feels fear, but acts well anyway, for a good reason.

That's the kind of courage my old tweet was reaching for. Not fearlessness. Just enough basic courage to try significant things without knowing how they'll turn out.

How to live well with uncertainty

• Name what you can't know. Write down the uncertain part of a decision. Seeing it clearly often makes it smaller than it felt.
• Separate the decision from the outcome. A good choice can still lead to a bad result, and that doesn't make it a bad choice. Judge yourself on how you decided.
• Take small, safe-to-fail steps. You don't have to leap. Try something you can learn from even if it doesn't work.
• Notice when you're avoiding. Ask yourself, "Am I not doing this because it's a bad idea, or because I can't predict how it will go?"
• Make room for wonder. When something good might happen, let yourself enjoy not knowing yet. Anticipation is part of the pleasure.

Today's reflection

You will never be certain about the things that matter most. That's not a problem to solve. It's the condition of being alive and free.

So today, pick one small thing you've been putting off because you can't be sure how it will turn out. Do it anyway, with Aristotle's kind of courage: feeling the fear, and acting for a good reason. The unknown might hold something worth discovering.

Sources

• de Berker, A. O., Rutledge, R. B., Mathys, C., Marshall, L., Cross, G. F., Dolan, R. J., & Bestmann, S. (2016). Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications, 7, 10996.
• Carleton, R. N. (2016). Into the unknown: A review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 39, 30–43.
• Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). The pleasures of uncertainty: Prolonging positive moods in ways people do not anticipate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(1), 5–21.
• Kierkegaard, S. (1844). The Concept of Anxiety.
• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book III.