At first, it seems innocuous. You’re burned out at work, and an influencer video promising the five steps to find the career you’ve always wanted catches your eye on Instagram. Perhaps you’re also anxious about a big birthday approaching, so while commuting home, you listen to a podcast host explain the seven essential habits you should start today to extend your lifespan by 20 years. Later on, you ask AI assistant ChatGPT to help resolve a debate with your partner.
Not knowing what’s going to happen is the worst. It’s also really good for us.
Elizabeth Weingartenis a journalist, applied behavioral scientist, and author of the book
How to Fall in Love With Questions. A former editor of
Behavioral Scientistmagazine, she writes about human behavior, timeless cultural questions, and how we navigate uncertainty in modern life.
In all of these moments, you are temporarily relieving your stress and anxiety. You might even be getting some answers. But with each path you go down, you’re also losing something important: the opportunity to sit with, and tolerate, uncertainty.
Being able to keep it together when an outcome is unknown is critical to enjoying your life. It’s what helps us manage friction in relationships, allows us to make considered decisions as opposed to acting on impulse, and empowers us to eventually take big leaps. But we’re collectively losing our ability to bear uncertainty.
The proliferation of the internet and smartphones kicked off the trend of reduced exposure, which a 2019 study suggested was linked to an overall decline in our ability to tolerate uncertainty. Now there’s emerging evidence from multiple studies suggesting that AI systems could be weakening our uncertainty muscles further. AI systems not only supply instant answers, but remove the need for us to make meaning of ambiguous experiences. They convert interpretation from something actively done to something that is outsourced, then passively consumed.
When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure.
One study comparing the responses of mental health professionals and chatbots found that the bots were more likely to provide advice than their human counterparts. Perhaps this is because they are designed to give us what we want, rather than what we need: Other research has found that people are more satisfied when their AI therapist provides advice instead of encouraging reflection, and are more likely to continue using it when it’s solution-oriented.
“It’s a skill to manage ambiguity and uncertainty, and if you’re not exposed to it, if you don’t know how to deal with it, you never learn that capacity,” Llewellyn van Zyl, a Netherlands-based wellbeing researcher and AI systems designer, told me. As LLMs supply immediate and sycophantic companionship, validation, and answers, they slowly replace the need to, for instance, practice ambiguity tolerance in the messy context of a human relationship, or to muddle through your own interpretation of an experience. “Friction, effort and struggle are not barriers to wellbeing but are the main ingredients needed for development to take place,” Van Zyl wrote in a paper.
Indeed, tolerating uncertainty often feels like a struggle, and for some people manifests as consistent anxiety or depression over being unable to control or predict the future. It is a state characterized by fear-based decision-making, where the ultimate achievement is avoiding discomfort and surprise at all costs.
But this way of living has an unexpected cost. If you’re especially anxious about a question or decision, that could indicate that you’re wedded to a single idea of what your future could look like, which could mean you close yourself off to other meaningful opportunities.
If you’ve increasingly found yourself looking for certainty and definitive answers, here’s how to get more comfortable sitting with unknowns.
How to strengthen your uncertainty muscles day-to-day #
If you’re lifting weights for the first time, you wouldn’t go in and try to deadlift 200 pounds; you’d work your way up to it. Similarly, building uncertainty tolerance starts by integrating small, safe, and low-stakes moments of practice — think of these ideas as your 5-pound dumbbells.
Identify the small opportunities.
First, look for ways in your daily life to live with short bursts of uncertainty and break out of your routine: For instance, try going to a restaurant without looking at the menu if you typically scour it first. Attend an exercise class with a new instructor if you never stray from your favorite, or grab a coffee with that new potential friend you’ve been meaning to hang out with.
Choosing uncertainty might lead to discomfort: The cafe could serve food you don’t like, the yoga teacher might be too intense, the new pal could turn out to be dull.
But as in weight lifting, comfort isn’t the point. It’s about enduring discomfort and getting stronger.
Find a simple phrase to bring you back to the present.
If you are feeling anxious as you attempt to practice this, you can try a couple of strategies from psychiatrist Judson Brewer’s book Unwinding Anxiety. He recommends learning to weave curiosity into our most stressful moments, asking questions like, “How is this feeling serving me right now?” Even a simple, “Hmmm…” when you feel anxiety can bring you into the present moment, and create the space for curiosity. In her new book, * Prophecy,* Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz also identifies curiosity as a salve for our obsession with answers. “If anxiety about the future is the main driver behind our craving for prediction, curiosity is one of its most powerful antidotes,” she writes. “... the more curiosity you can manage to conjure about the present, the less apprehension you’ll feel about the future, because your attention will be in the here and now.”
Learn to ask the right questions #
Curiosity is fueled by questions. But not all questions are created equal.
A good question, the Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Sutherland told me for my recent book, “will always make the room bigger, or open a door in the room to let something else in, or blow down the walls of the room entirely.” Obsessing over finding fast, easy answers to your biggest life questions can give you tunnel vision, eliminating possible futures by keeping fear and anxiety at the wheel.
From the stories and research I explored in my book, I’ve learned that great questions — the best curiosity fuel — have a few key attributes: Avoid yes or no questions in favor of something more expansive.
First, as Sutherland explained, the best questions grow your set of possible solutions and futures. Sometimes, a binary question — e.g., *Am I in the right relationship? *— can make you feel stuck because it’s artificially limiting the options. A better question opens up possibilities, so instead you might instead ask yourself, “How would my partner and I both need to change in order for us to stay together?
Make sure your question is your own.
A great question serves as an internal GPS leading you back to your own needs and values, not what someone else might want or expect of you.
Take, for instance, a question like, Am I ever going to get married or Should I have a second kid? Not only are these binary questions, but they also could be questions that a family member is pressuring you to answer.
The best questions are the ones you create. They are rooted in self-compassion, allowing you to build yourself up rather than tear yourself down. Try to ask yourself questions that take the pressure off, that give you space to breathe.
Find a question that propels you forward.
Ah, regret. It plays an important role in our lives, but should be used sparingly, if at all, as question fuel. Think about questions like, What if I had just done it differently? or Why did we break up? If great questions open up a window or a door, these kinds of queries board them up. They keep you stuck in a stale, ruminative loop, rehashing the past rather than moving on and considering possible futures. If what you’re seeking is clarity or answers, these kinds of questions won’t provide them.
Take the pressure off #
The last way to get comfortable with uncertainty is more subtle. It’s a mindset shift rooted in a 120-year-old piece of advice that the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke offered to an aspiring poet, Franz Kappus.
Kappus had written to Rilke asking him all kinds of questions about how to live his life. Rilke responded:
I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.
Part of what can make uncertainty so uncomfortable is the sense of urgency it creates in us. We treat questions like problems that need immediate solutions. Rilke offers a powerful reframe: Questions are not tormentors, but teachers. And finding answers, especially to our most challenging questions, is not something that can happen instantly. Questions must be *lived. *
This advice is an invitation to and take a breath. You do not need to have all of the answers today, tomorrow, or next week. In fact, when it comes to the big questions of our life, it’s better if you don’t seek the answers immediately.
It is also a reminder to go out and live your life. It’s easy to let anxiety about uncertainty stop us from pursuing new experiences — even seemingly small steps into the unknown can feel very scary. When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure. Instead of defining security as being protected from challenge, we can define it as being ready to face whatever the future holds.