Uncertainty is worse than bad news

Hi there,

I have a friend, I’ll call her Dana, who likes to know where everything in her life is going before she gets there. And I don’t mean next month. I mean years out: where she’ll be living, what her title will be, when the house will be paid off. She’s the kind of person who needs to know how things will turn out before she takes a leap.

I tease her about it, but I’m not that different. I’ve always liked a plan. I like knowing what comes next, and I like having some kind of map that tells me whether I’m on track or not.

And for most of my life and career, that worked out pretty well for me.

Familiar territory

For those of us who went the professional route, you know how it goes. You get the degree, maybe a second one. You land the internship, which leads to the first job, and then you climb. A promotion here, a raise there, a bigger title, and one thing leads pretty naturally to the next. Nobody had to tell you what progress looked like. Plenty of people had walked that road before you, so you could more or less see where it led.

I found a lot of comfort in that, more than I realized at the time.

And there’s actually a reason for it. Researchers have found that uncertainty can be harder on us than bad news. In one 2016 study, people were most stressed when they had a fifty-fifty chance of getting a mild shock, more than when they knew for sure it was coming. Not knowing was worse than knowing the worst. So when I think about why that ladder felt so good, I don’t think it was really the promotions. It was being able to see the next rung.

Changing landscape

What I’m noticing now, in my own life and in conversations with people around me, is that the ladder isn’t as clear as it used to be, even for professionals, who were supposed to be the safe bet.

AI is changing what a lot of jobs look like, sometimes faster than the people doing them can keep up. Roles that seemed solid a few years ago are getting reshaped. New kinds of work are showing up that didn’t even have a name when most of us were in school. And people I know, smart and accomplished people, are finding themselves in new terrain.

I’m in it too. And for the first time, I could make a choice that seemed completely sensible based on what was in front of me and still have no real idea what kind of career it was building toward.

For someone who likes a plan, that was really uncomfortable.

Next right step…

What I’ve slowly had to learn is to make the next decision with what I know today, instead of waiting until I can see the whole thing.

Some of those decisions turned into things that matter a lot to me now. Others lasted a few months before I could tell they weren’t going anywhere, and I let them go. And a couple were flops pretty much from the start.

But what surprised me is that every one of them, the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t, taught me something I wouldn’t have known otherwise. Each step gave me a little more information for the next one. It’s only looking back now that I can see a thread running through them. At the time I couldn’t. I just did what made sense right then and hoped it left me a little better prepared for whatever came after.

What I’m learning

I’m not going to pretend I’ve made peace with uncertainty. Some days I still want to skip to the end of the book and read the last page first. But I’m a lot more comfortable than I used to be making a decision without knowing exactly where it leads. I’ve seen that the next step usually shows itself once I take the one in front of me.

Maybe you’re feeling that too, the itch to have it all figured out in a world that won’t sit still long enough to let you. If so, maybe the goal isn’t a better map. Maybe it’s getting a little more okay walking without one, paying attention as you go, and trusting that the path will make more sense from further along.

I still get why Dana wants to know how it all ends. Part of me will probably always want that too.

But I’ve lived enough life now to know I can find my way without it. And I think what I was really looking for all those years wasn’t a plan. It was some kind of promise that I’d be okay. The plan was just the closest thing I could find to one.

So I’ll leave you with this: what would you do next if you didn’t need to know how it was going to end? Or better yet, what if you did the thing, and it flopped, and you were still okay? I’m starting to think that’s the only certainty any of us ever really had.

Until next week,

Shakila