Uncertainty
Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: The Exponential Age by Azeem Azar
Listening: Working for the Knife by Mitski
(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status)
Uncertainty
As humans, we're nudged by our biologies to wonder what's on the other side of every mountain and driven to push ever-outward in a million directions at once.
We're not built to tolerate uncertainty. It's stressful! It might portend danger. No unknowns for me, thanks.
Our drive to figure things out exposes us to new uncertainties, though. The act of exploration and discovery solves some mysteries, but also tends to unveil new ones.
This dispositional incongruity can be crazy-making, as it can—suddenly and without warning—make even familiar places, people, ideas, routines, and relationships seem strange and volatile.
What we perceived as being stable yesterday might reveal itself to be anything but, today. And that change of status can be the consequence of shifting variables beyond our control, but it can also result from learning something new: cresting a metaphorical mountain and putting old uncertainties to rest while concurrently encountering brand new ones.
This process can be exhausting.
Our brains aim for energetic efficiency, and to that end they build frameworks of the world so a lot of what we do on a daily basis can be shorthanded.
This is how the world works, this is how I perform the tasks I undertake daily, this is how various things in my environment are connected to each other.
These mental models (called "heuristics") allow us to function without having to re-compute every single thing we do every single day. It saves a lot of cognitive bandwidth.
When something happens that violates these frameworks, however, we're thrown for a loop that can be both unnerving and more energetically expensive than our typical mode of operation.
We thought things worked one way, but actually maybe they don't.
Oh no oh no oh no.
Our brains then scramble to collect data to fill in the gaps and build a new framework.
This can be stressful and exhausting, and can put us on edge because our understandings of things—which tend to serve as foundations for other understandings—no longer seem as solid and secure.
At times, the best response to sudden uncertainty of this kind is to seek out new information and fill in the gaps. We've got plenty of motivation to do so, and this can sometimes be an excellent moment to climb some more mountains, take a long look around, and open ourselves up to re-learning all sorts of things.
In other cases, though, it's prudent to pull back a bit, hunker down, and restock our psychological reserves.
This is especially true when the uncertainties we face seem likely to remain uncertain for a while, no matter how much info we scramble to collect, because new certainties—new bases for future frameworks—haven't coalesced yet; the variables that've been upended haven't stabilized and are likely to keep changing shape for a while.
It's seldom ideal to remain intentionally ignorant about things happening around us, then, but it's prudent to understand the difference between things that are knowable and things that are currently in flux—the psychological cost of trying to build new mental models predicated on either heads or tails when the coin is still in the air, and is likely to remain there for some time.
The right balance of info-seeking and well-being maintenance is worth pursuing, then, whether we're in the midst of a bad breakup, a global pandemic, a rapidly escalating international conflict, or any other unknown that may trigger large quantities of stress and unrest.
If you found some value in this essay, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee :)
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Projects
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: Your Dream Job Doesn't Exist
Brain Lenses: Thought-Terminating Clichés
I Will Read To You: The Reading Mother
Let’s Know Things: Speculation
Curiosity Weekly / Daily: Mar 1, 2022 / Feb 28, 2022
One Sentence News: Mar 2, 2022 (podcast version)
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Interesting & Useful
"Pigeon chess" or "like playing chess with a pigeon" is a figure of speech originating from a comment made by Scott D. Weitzenhoffer regarding Eugenie Scott's book Evolution vs. Creationism.
The Cost of Space Flight Before and After SpaceX How much does a space flight cost? Here’s a look at the cost per kilogram for space launches across the globe since 1960.
We Couldn’t Get an Artificial Intelligence Program to Win the New Yorker Caption Contest This is how close we got to getting the New Yorker to accept an AI-generated caption.
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Outro
As mentioned in the photo captions above, I visited the Museum of Wisconsin Art last weekend, and really enjoyed the trip.
Like most of the other jaunts I've been taking of late, West Bend is less than an hour's drive from Milwaukee—I'm making a point of sticking relatively close to home right now, and planning to slowly increase my range of operation as things begin to open back up, and as (hopefully) pandemic numbers continue to trend in the right direction.
That said, if you're looking for a way to break up your routine, consider 1. visiting a museum (they're almost always beautiful spaces, filled with beautiful things and friendly people), and/or 2. taking a little trip to a nearby place (if you can't decide where, put an artificial limit on your range—like 30-minutes from home, or 60 miles away—and then choose a random spot within that radius).
Be safe, take precautions where warranted and according to your preferences, and be open to enjoying whatever you find when you arrive, whether that means meandering through remote back roads, taking a train to a part of the city you've never seen before, checking out a used bookstore in a nearby town, or grabbing a bite at a little diner that's on the map and which inexplicably has no reviews anywhere on the internet.
Also! I'm planning to do a little daily writing exercise starting next week, and I'd love to have you join me, if you're keen to do so.
All you'll need is a pack of tarot cards and probably ten minutes a day in which to write.
Any tarot cards will do (I bought a basic deck for about $10 online after failing to find a used set locally—people really hang on to these things!) and there are a bunch of free digital (and printable) versions out there, as well.
I'll share more details about what I'm planning next week, but I wanted to give you a chance to procure a deck if you're keen to participate, in the meantime.
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How are you feeling at the moment? How's your outlook on things, and has anything changed for you recently? What are you up to now, and do you have any plans you're especially excited about?
Tell me what's up and/or just say hello by replying to this newsletter or writing to colin@exilelifestyle.com. I respond to every email I receive and would love to hear from you :)
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If you’re finding some value in what I’m doing here, consider supporting my work: Become an Understandary member / Buy me a coffee