21 Harsh Truths About Why You’re Still Lost - Mark Manson - #1096

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
The most important skill in the 21st century is the ability to live happily with uncertainty.

**Mark Manson** (0:07)
Yeah, I mean, do you know what's going on?

**Chris Williamson** (0:12)
Almost never.

**Mark Manson** (0:12)
I mean, millions of people tune in to listen to you to try to figure out what's going on, and you still don't know what's going on. So if you and I can't figure it out, I think we're all pretty...
It is interesting that as access to information scales, the certainty and the confidence around that information dissipates. I feel like everybody feels less moored to reality than ever before, despite the fact that we have access to everything 24-7, which is a very weird paradox. But I think there's a deep human instinct to seek out certainty, to find a certain set of beliefs and assumptions that you can kind of like hang your hat on and build your life around. And I think it's becoming harder than it's ever been before. And I think as a result, developing kind of the cognitive flexibility to live in ambiguity is probably more important than it's ever been.

**Chris Williamson** (1:17)
What happens if you can't deal with uncertainty?

**Mark Manson** (1:22)
Then you will over index on one single belief, right? So you'll become radical about one idea. You'll basically put all of your kind of emotional well-being into a single concept or a single world worldview. And the danger of that is just that like any every worldview is going to get blown up at a certain point. Like nothing survives contact with reality.
So when you are forced, you know, when that worldview gets contradicted, you're either going to suffer immensely or you're going to have to double down the delusion to maintain the certainty.

**Chris Williamson** (2:00)
Anxiety is all about uncertainty. It's about trying to compress uncertainty down. I don't know what's going to happen in future. If I can imagine all of the different ways that the future might unfold, especially the really bad ones, I'll be able to plan and war game. And that means that when it happens, I'll be ready.
It's a really strange comment on how humans' brains work that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty.

**Mark Manson** (2:31)
Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (2:34)
You think about it as thinking in superpositions.
People would rather collapse the superposition down into something that maybe even breaks the laws of physics. Your dead grandma comes back from the grave to tell you off for this thing. The entire supernatural shit's going on. That's what you would rather have in your mind.

**Mark Manson** (2:54)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (2:54)
Than, I don't know what's going to happen.

**Mark Manson** (2:56)
Right.
It's interesting to what you described about anxiety, that treadmill that you get on, right? Of trying to predict future outcomes. In the process of trying to predict those outcomes, trying to become certain about what's going to happen, you actually just inadvertently build more surface area for more uncertainty. Because everything you try to project into the future, you just create more opportunities for that to be wrong.

**Chris Williamson** (3:26)
Yes.

**Mark Manson** (3:27)
So it's interesting because I think actually the antidote to this, it's more of an aperture issue. I think instead of trying to be certain about very specific small narrow things, it's better to try to zoom out till you find a place of confidence.
Just take AI for instance. Everybody's freaking out about it.
Some people think the world's going to end, some people think everybody's going to lose their jobs, some people think China is going to take over everything. I have no idea if any of those things are true, but if I zoom out broadly enough and you just look at every major technological revolution throughout human history, there is disruption, there is some displacement, but society adapts and moves on. If I zoom out to that wide of an aperture, suddenly I feel some degree of certainty that we're going to be okay in the macro. But in the micro, right, of like, are you and I going to have jobs in two years? Less certainty about that.

**Chris Williamson** (4:32)
Yeah, it's a kind of fragility to need a lot of certainty. Because what you're saying is, I can't deal with something that I can't anticipate. I don't have enough robustness in my system. If something happens that I haven't planned for, the only way that I can survive the future is if I've already prepared for it. And that's the opposite of robustness or the best anti-fragility. Look at COVID.
Everybody's lives during COVID basically forked into one of two directions. People either went way off the rails or people's lives got stupendously better. But that's it. It wasn't really anyone who's like, yeah, COVID was okay. Yeah, it ticked over and stuff really didn't change. My trajectory stayed the same. That was like a lifestyle raw shock test that everybody took. Everybody looked at it and some people went in one direction and some people went in the other.