Though I have approached the subject in many ways, the immediate inspiration was the title of this post – The Allergy to Uncertainty. As is my wont, I projected it onto myself, and began (over?)analysing. 😀
Reasons & Seasons
Why do I have the allergy? At one level, I could answer that I am (at least partly) a product of my past. I think I had a lot of uncertainty in my formative years – change of schools and friends, change of homes, change of what I’d call a security system. And as a child, I think certainty in the context of academic/ singing/ quizzing results brought validation and less punishment. It created the “false self” constructed to survive childhood – something I learned from this excellent book.
Some of it is also a continuation of the false self in adulthood – a set of habits and even values inculcated for better productivity and increasing one’s value in a professional and sometimes personal context. The ‘allergy’ post I linked to at the top is also a good read on this subject.
Quick judgment of others belongs here too. Because I want to be able to predict the way they will behave, so my life won’t get affected!
Uncertainty feels expensive. In wealth and relationships. And as my heart scene goes, in health too! So what’s the problem?
Conundrum
I’ve spent decades building freedom by systematically removing uncertainty from the parts of life I could control. The biggest decisions of my life have all been attempts to maximise freedom. Sometimes freedom ‘from’, but increasingly freedom ‘to’.
It probably began with David Graeber’s three basic freedoms – the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements. But now it has come down to my biggest freedom – time, and zero obligations to do something unless I want to.
But strangely, though the uncertainty is minimal, I still feel something is missing. And that’s what the over-analysis was about.
In my worldview it seemed uncertainty and freedom were mortal enemies. Because uncertainty takes away from freedom by way of unexpected changes in schedule, money. Constrained as I was with that world view, it required AI to give a directional twist to this line of thinking.
Quite often uncertainty creates freedom.
If everything is known, every move is predetermined.
Exploration only exists because uncertainty exists.
Children playing.
Travelling.
Falling in love.
Starting companies.
Making art.
All depend on uncertainty.
So the opposite of freedom is not uncertainty, but more likely predictability.
AI also expanded that I have mistaken control for freedom. Truth be told, I should have caught this earlier because at least a couple of my previous posts on the subject of freedom – The building blocks of freedom and Truly Free on the subject has the quote “If I need things to be a certain way, I’m held hostage by them” byJonny Wilkenson.
A time to play
A clue to the direction ahead came from “What we seek is not meaning, but the feeling of aliveness” ~ Joseph Campbell. Again, I seemed to have walked this path earlier in that second post above.
And so I wondered – is flow (like freedom) and opposite of certainty. Especially since time is the basic construct we let go of in the ‘flow’ state?
Again AI had a good perspective
Many flow activities are extremely certain.
A pianist.
A chess player.
A surgeon.
What disappears isn’t certainty.
It’s self-conscious control.
Or perhaps time itself.
That made sense because I had also linked ‘flow’ to nishkama karma in the Bhagvad Gita.
It’s acting without attachment to outcomes.
Which is another way of saying – reducing my dependence on certainty. Freedom is only a means.
I wondered if this is happening because I am finally at a point when I can afford flow. At that’s why I spend hours on making goofy posters that sometimes only I find funny.
AI had a slightly different take again.
You’ve spent decades optimising for optionality.
Now that optionality has been achieved, optimisation itself has become less rewarding.
That sounds right because the activities I enjoy most now seem to be the ones where I stop trying to optimise outcomes
The answer therefore is sharper – what I am allergic to is uncertainty that threatens autonomy – time, money, health, or ability to choose. In everything else, play naturally replaces optimisation.
I have to wonder though, if I can ever be not allergic to that uncertainty.
A time to stop
Beyond my own reasons, I have another reason to think so. One of the most illuminating books I read this year is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Becker’s thesis is that much of human behaviour is an attempt to defend against mortality and contingency.
Reducing uncertainty – through money, routines, reputation, productivity, planning – can all be seen as ways of insulating ourselves from the terrifying fact that life is fundamentally uncontrollable.
Perhaps my allergy to uncertainty isn’t just about freedom or even flow. Becker would probably argue that it’s another way I negotiate with my own fragility – trying to convince myself that life is more within my control than it really is.
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