There are many things that we do not know. Some things are impossible to know and some are simply too complicated. This leads to us creating theories about the world. As we learn more and more we are able to refine our theories. Using what we do know to fill in the things we do not. The fact that the world will always be filled with theories, shows how little we will always know. This is simply the burden we must bare. There is a subtle difference between things we will never know and things that are obscured by complexity. One is where the knowledge was never within reach and the other is simply that we do not have access to that knowledge. In many ways it is the latter that we deal with on a daily basis. Whenever we have unknowns in our life it creates uncertainty because it is something we can’t plan for. As humans, it goes against our relentless pursuit of stability; so much so, that we try everything in our power to eliminate it. This is why the subtle difference between unknowns and complexity have a big impact on our life. The small sliver of hope that we can reach the knowledge we need leads us to expend a disproportionate amount of our time searching for something we will probably never find.
The uncertainty of tomorrow causes us to drown out today. We seek to bring stability to tomorrow by sacrificing today, simply because we want to be able to predict the consequences of our choices. The issue is we inherently are dealing with probabilities when looking to the future. Uncertainty and the future are one in the same. By having expectations we create an environment of right or wrong we introduce the idea of having regrets. This can only happen if we choose to walk into the future completely blind and even then the regret shouldn’t be the choice we made but the fact we went in blind. Uncertainty will always be a mainstay in our life as long as we are always subjected to unknowns. We must stop ourselves from rejecting uncertainty, instead we should work with it.
If only we had more information we would know what to do. At what point do we realize that the information we seek will surely never come. We spend our energies looking for all of the facts instead of understanding our limitations. It is how our world operates, with great uncertainty. The best we can do is to take the available information and create the best theory we can. Then with as much confidence as we can in life, we march forward with our theory. Ready to refine it as it becomes battle tested. There is so much we will never know. We must live our lives embracing this idea. To be humbled by the fact that it is simply us and our theories going about our lives in this complicated world.
