Ok, so technically it is Thursday, but here is the latest Uncertainty Wednesday post. Today I want to draw a second important conclusion that follows from the post about the pervasiveness of uncertainty and last week’s post about the fundamental unknowability of your alternative lives: There is no fundamentally safe path through life. Stuff can and will go wrong, with varying degrees of bad consequences (of course, by the same token you can also have upside surprises, but we will leave those for another day).
Some people, over time, build up crippling fears as a result of this realization. For instance, you might become very afraid of touching anything for fear of picking up a deadly germ. Or you might never travel by air for fear of a plane crash. But none of that makes you totally safe. The building you are in might collapse due to an earthquake. Or you might develop a cancer based on some random mutation of one of your trillions of cells.
And it doesn’t have to be an existential risk that becomes a crippling fear. Take something rather mundane such as preparing a presentation. You might be worried about the reaction of the audience. So you try to avoid saying anything that could be controversial. But that runs the risk of giving a really boring presentation. And so you might develop a fear of giving any kind of presentation at all.
It is too facile to dismiss crippling fear as simply irrational. For starters of course most of us have inherited the ability to experience fear as one of the primal emotions as it has served an important evolutionary purpose of self preservation (some people have little or no fear due to a genetic mutation or a brain injury). So saying to someone “oh, don’t worry about that” when there is a real risk, even when that risk is small, ignores fundamentals about the brain.
So what is the alternative? Acceptance. By this I don’t mean being willing to accept any and all risks, no matter how extreme (wing suit flying?). I also don’t mean acceptance of the status quo, no matter how bad. And I don’t mean acceptance in the sense of believing that everything is fate and simply pre-ordained. I simply mean accepting that stuff can and will go wrong, no matter what path you choose.
Acceptance though is a higher level faculty. Unlike fear, it does not “ship” with the brain, but instead has to be practiced. Much of human religion and ritual of course has been designed to try and instill acceptance, but often the wrong type, namely the one that focuses on accepting the status quo. The best practice of acceptance that I have found comes from the Stoics and it focuses on imagining loss as a way of avoiding attachment (which Buddhists correctly identified as the source of suffering). For an introduction, I recommend reading “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.”
