Essay 2: Certainty

 Essay 2: Certainty

My mom was a baby whisperer. Whenever we went on international trips as a family, there was usually a baby crying on the flight and my mom could never resist helping their poor mother. My mom held the baby, often even taking the baby back to her seat, and in a matter of minutes the baby was sound asleep. Years ago I wondered how that was possible, to an outsider’s perspective one could hardly tell the difference between what the baby’s mom and my mom did, but in hindsight, it is so obvious. Confidence, that’s the answer. My mom already had three children and was naturally very confident, and the baby could feel that. An issue anyone exposed to babies knows is that the cry of a baby is panic-inducing. Something within humans, more so with women, will always respond to the cry of a baby, it was ingrained in us through evolution. So the natural response of the sleep-deprived, working parent is to figure out what is wrong and make sure the baby stops crying as soon as possible so they can get back to what they were doing. This is the wrong approach. For a baby every day is a life-changing experience, they are tired, they are changing, and all they desperately want is to feel something safe and certain. Fumbling around trying to figure out what is wrong with the baby will not provide that certainty, the weakness and desperation come through and cause more panic for the baby. My claim is that, as individuals, that certainty-needing baby is still within us all, the only thing that has changed is that the world makes more sense to us as adults. This essay will be focused on familiarizing you with that part of yourself, and I will do that by delving into what is certainty, why we sense, why we have habits, why we fear, why we think, and what we can do to healthily derive a sense of certainty from a world that makes no sense.

Certainty is the need we have to be assured that we can secure pleasure or avoid pain. In this definition, the most important term is assured, we want to feel assured. Like virtually everything else about us, this was something engrained in our DNA due to evolution. We evolved to fear the monster in the bushes. Those of us who have been lost in the woods have been in touch with that fear at some point. In the dead of night, the immediate panic that runs through us when it feels like we touched something web-like is universal. The panic that comes as a result of a silhouette that looks like a bear as we wander through a dark forest is universal. Most of us can easily train ourselves to calm down and take a second look, but that is not how we were born. The reason why is obvious, an animal can mistakenly go into flight-or-flight a thousand times due to false alarms in their lives and stay alive just fine, but failing to notice a predator once could be the end of them. Over time evolution selects for the animal that panics. Note too that training ourselves to calm down and evaluate the situation before panicking is not getting over the need for certainty, it is just staving off panic by assuring ourselves that the best chance we have to live lies in careful observation, note the word “assuring”. There are many ways we assure ourselves, the most common of which is making sense of the world around us. The most ardent Absurdists and Existentialists advocating for radical acceptance of the unknown and uncertain are nothing but hypocrites because they can read this essay.

The most common expression of our need for certainty lies in our immediate tendency to make sense of the world. Have you ever wondered why babies have such a high choking risk? The obvious and partially correct answer is that babies are too inexperienced to know not to swallow small objects so they will just swallow objects while not knowing the danger. Completing that answer lies in understanding that babies would put everything in their mouths if they could. This is because putting objects in their mouth is how they make sense of the world. Mouths have sensitive sensory nerve endings that allow babies to feel the texture, taste, and shape in making sense of an object. When a baby puts something in their mouth the object turns from something unsensible, uncertain, and nerve-wracking to something tangible and interactable. The human mind likes to reduce everything into how we can interact with it, in fact, we do not even see objects, we see purposes. We reduce everything to friend or foe, tool or obstacle, known or unknown, and as we age our process of seeing becomes reflective of that. This is a coarse description which will be clarified when I discuss the universal of subjugation next essay. To finish off this point, this early stage in a baby’s life is defined by Freud as the Oral Stage of Psychosexual Development. It says a lot about the potency and presence of certainty in our lives when the Father of Psychoanalysis posited that the first 18 months of our life are defined by this process of making sense of the world orally.

The point of the above paragraph is that through regular interaction with something that was originally new, we make sense of it. Making sense of something can be defined neurologically as the localizing and strengthening of the neural pathways that need to be activated when interacting with an object or situation. When we perform a task for the first time, especially something difficult, nearly all of our brain is activated at once, expending a lot of energy. That is why doing new things is so mentally exhausting. This also accounts for why when we do something for the first time we can be anxious, nervous, and hyper-engaged, as all are sensations directly related to activating large portions of the brain. As we do said task repeatedly the portion of our brain used to achieve the task gradually reduces to a select few, highly strengthened neural pathways, thus radically reducing the energy requirement and giving us a sense of calm, confidence, and certainty. This localization of our brain is useful as the less of our brain we use, the less energy we need to perform the task successfully, and the more of our bandwidth we can use on other things mentally. If you ever noticed that you can hold a conversation or multi-task while successfully driving, that is why, god knows we were far worse at that the first time we drove. Something that can be viewed as a downside though is that once we have established that strong neural pathway, any changes to it are hard to implement, this is known as habit.

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken,” this quote is largely attributed to Warren Buffet but had a slightly different form initially said by Samuel Johnson. Thus far, this is the greatest quote I have ever heard to highlight the double-edged sword of habit-forming. On the one hand, habits are amazing. They allow you to do something better, with less energy, more quickly, and in a way that draws you in and reinforces itself. It provides certainty that you know how to handle the situation in front of you, you know when you will be done, you know you will be alright, and you know what to expect; all of which puts you at ease. On the other hand, the neural connection of a habit is so established that changing anything about the way we do something feels like learning the entire action from scratch and trying not to slip back into old habits is difficult. This is also why many of us also lose a sense of exploration and novelty in life. Some of us have such a defined daily routine that trying to change anything beyond the superficial is difficult. When we have sleep habits, an income, a job, a diet, a hobby, a relationship, friends, and family that have not failed us, we come to repeat the same actions ad nauseam, restricting uncertainty that which fits within the framework of the habits we have built, and attaching emotions to everything staying how they are. This is reliance, which is not inherently bad, but is something we should be cognizant of. This reliance, the ultimate expression of someone with an elevated need for certainty, regularly conflicts with reality, as the only real certainty in life is change, which is not restricted to superficial change.

Did you know fear is an acronym? Well, it’s not but I view it as FUCK EVERYTHING AND RUN! Running is the most common response when we have an urge for certainty (at least for me). Remember, urges come from a notable deficiency in what the need is looking for. So what are we running from? When an animal is chasing us we run away from the animal since we want to be assured of gaining pleasure or avoiding pain, but what if the predator is a future event or something internal? This is why we engage in escapism, as in the moment we gain certainty because the problem escapes our phenomenological reality, and the weight of countless points of focus calling upon us to do something non-habitual or habit-destroying disappears. Fear is not logical, it is not reasonable, it does not allow room for debate, and all we want to do when we fear is return to what we know. Why do we perceive relationships as going better than they are? Because we fear losing our greatest source of love and do not want to risk never finding something better. Why do stay with a job we do not like? Because we have maintained a career trajectory that kept us and our loved ones alive and we do not want to risk running through our savings and ending up with a worse job. We ignore and gloss over important matters because we run, we run because we are scared, and we are scared because of certainty.

As much as this may seem like a radical statement, our need for certainty is quite literally why we think. Not “think about something”, it is why we think at all, period! We think so that our stupid ideas die before we do. If there is $200 at the top of a massive tree, thinking about trying and falling off is why we do not climb up. However, this also results in us overthinking things we want to do. For example, this is why men are such wimps at asking women out in person. Rejection hits the untrained right in the significance and all of us hate that feeling. Logic and problems will both be the themes of future essays but the point here is that there is no difference emotionally between the first and second scenario, which is why the solution to being a more daring and risk-taking person is not being more logical and thinking more, it is acting before you have time to think. This also applies to more in-depth, introspective thoughts, as often we are trying to derive an assurance that we are taking the best course of action moving forward. At times, it even applies to pleasurable thoughts, as there are usually problems we are running away from by engaging our minds like this.

Certainty is such a powerful opiate that we will suffocate from burying our heads in the sand before ever truly noticing a bad habit we rely upon. This is why we need people who will scream at us in life. People who will punch us with what we least want to hear and demand that we change ourselves. Nietzsche once said “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I do not agree with religion being so in its ideal form, but habits and comfort (what I believe he was referring to), are the biggest addictions we have. Some people’s answer is the outright rejection of making sense of the world (which is what habits are), or at the very least not to “rely” on anything and revel in the freedom. I have never heard such a stupid idea in my life, that is literally starving yourself. How quickly would one fall into insanity if they could not trust that the floor would not break from beneath them? On top of that, ridding ourselves of reliance is not even a physical possibility. Conversely, the type of anxiety-inducing reliance on everything happening according to plan and in a certain way that defines OCD and Autism is clearly not the right answer either, so how should we maintain a healthy relationship with certainty?

I propose that a strong sense of self, purely tethered to the core of our being is how we healthily fulfill our need for certainty. The story of Joseph highlighted this, I will summarize it by pointing first at the fact that we give ourselves to the world all the time. We do so by relying on factors external to ourselves for the fulfillment of our needs, meaning that for many of us, our need for certainty is derived from everything outside of us going according to plan. That is our right, as these emotions are ours to give, but there is something within us all that we have no right to give because it was never ours in the first place. This is our soul, or core of our being, as long as we live it is there, and we can rely on it truly and fully. This reliance on something that cannot fail is how we gain eternal confidence in our path because all we need to know is that we are alive and then derive certainty from the acknowledgment that as long as we are alive, we can get everything else sorted out. Remember, when a bird has the time of her life singing on the branch of a tall tree, she does not rely on the branch not breaking, she trusts in her ability to fly. No need to rely on anything outside of yourself keeping to the plan, just trust your ability to fly and watch how much more relaxed you become.

One caveat, this does not mean to not think about the future, but there is a time and place. Nietzsche once said “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” so making a ritual of finding your purpose in this world and creating a plan to get there is an absolute must. What I argue for is to not always think of the whole road ahead, when you drive all you need to know is the next turn. Driving in this case refers to the act of acting upon your plans. Be present, and have a strong connection to the core of your being, and your need for certainty will be satisfied without fail!

See you sometime before January 10 for Essay 3: Things!