Chapter Content
Okay, so, wow, we're, like, near the end of this journey, which is kind of a bummer, right? We've been diving into this world that's totally different from what we think it is, you know? All those simple explanations and models we use? Total lies! Our brains are even wired to trick us. The reality is that everything is connected, always changing, and even the tiniest things can have a huge impact. It's like, if you change *anything*, you change *everything*. It's a bit mind-blowing, but, like, the world is basically uncertain, unexplainable, and pretty much uncontrollable.
So, what do we *do* with that? I mean, how do we actually *live* knowing all this?
Well, there's this essayist, Maria Popova, who says that "to live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live." And, like, how many of us are just stuck on the hamster wheel, you know, not even noticing the wonder anymore? It's time to let go of this idea that we can control everything and just, like, appreciate the beauty of uncertainty. If you just look for it.
Maybe our problem is that we're so obsessed with controlling a world that *can't* be controlled. We're stuck in this quest for certainty that always leads to disappointment. We see random events as just weird coincidences instead of seeing them as part of this amazing, complex system. When we try to simplify everything with these rigid models, we lose sight of the bigger picture. Life becomes this, like, constant slog of trying to "solve for X," always thinking we're just one step away from what we want, but then it never really satisfies us.
And yet, we keep trying to control everything, to optimize everything. We're so focused on achieving some kind of progress, like, "Can we hit the Q3 target?" But when we try to turn everything into this constant optimization, we lose our humanity, you know? We're just going through the motions, trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of everything. And, like, life becomes a checklist. But some of the best moments are when we *aren't* being efficient, when we're just experiencing something, you know?
It's this weird paradox. We're, like, super prosperous, but also super alienated and anxious. We've built these amazing civilizations, but millions of people need medication just to cope with living in them. We can control so much, invent incredible things, but, like, are we actually better off? We're better off on paper, but a lot of people *feel* worse.
This sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, says it's because we're trying to control the world. It's this constant need to increase our "share of the world." Relationships become just "networking," you know? And this writer, Karen Armstrong, talks about how people go to museums and just take a photo with their phone instead of actually experiencing the art. It's like, they need to "own" it in some way. But Rosa says that we only really experience the world when we encounter the uncontrollable. That's when we feel moved, alive. It's like, even at a wedding, we remember the unexpected stuff.
And yet, there are these people out there who are selling this idea that we *can* control everything. That you're the main character in your own story, and you can shape the plot if you just think positively.
There's this book called "The Secret" that's sold millions of copies, and it basically says that poverty is just a mental state. If you don't have enough money, it's because you're blocking it with your thoughts. And, like, your thoughts send out this magnetic signal that attracts things back to you. It's crazy! It's like, if those who were enslaved could just imagine themselves differently.
This is nonsense. People don't *choose* to be victims of terrible things. The world isn't fair. Random things happen. It can be comforting to accept that we're just, like, cosmic flukes, drifting in a sea of uncertainty. We don't have to control everything. It's okay.
The problem is that these people are selling a lie. They're selling a roadmap to the impossible. They're saying that any problem can be solved with more money, more control, more individual action. They ignore the interconnected nature of reality. The only reason to look inward, they say, is so you can conquer the outward world. It’s the self-obsessed narcissist's guide to the universe. And even if it *did* work that way, research shows that people tend to get stuck on this hedonic treadmill, chasing things that they think will make them happy, but then they end up in the same place.
This doesn't mean we should just give up and accept injustice. Striving is part of being human. But we need to change the way we see the world. You can't control the world with incantations. Putting your faith in these, like, fake gurus will lead to disappointment.
But it's not just that trying to control everything makes us miserable. It also makes the world *less* controllable. You know, Mao's campaign to eliminate pests in China led to a massive famine. Complexity science shows that we're living on the edge of chaos. And what do we do? We try to optimize everything to death, leaving no room for error. We've had all these calamities, amplified by over-optimized systems, and yet we keep doing the same thing.
The world has become even more uncertain. That kind of uncertainty, where lives are on a knife's edge, creates catastrophic risk. We should learn our lesson and build more slack into our systems. It's a sturdier way to live.
But there's also good uncertainty. Imagine if you knew *everything* that would happen in your life. It'd be a cold, boring world. We need mystery.
We imagine we want a world we can fully control, but we actually crave a balance between order and disorder. We like classical music and jazz, the symmetry of a snowflake and the shape of a cloud. We respect sensible people, but we also celebrate mavericks and the unpredictable in ourselves. Life would be boring if everything were structured, but pure disorder would destroy us.
We need both order and chaos. But many of us feel we have too little chaos. So, we try to force it. But that doesn't work. Within this mindset of control, moments of joy are to be *engineered*, not discovered. Everything becomes a metric. "Did you really go on that walk if your Fitbit didn't register it?" If every goal leads to another goal, are we just always striving for something unattainable? How many actions do we take that *aren't* for something else?
Embracing uncertainty means focusing less on how your actions will optimize the future and focusing more on celebrating the present. It's this symphony of life, played by trillions of beings, culminating in this unique moment.
It's humbling to realize you're not the conductor, but just one string in the symphony. We can't know where we're going or why we're here. It leads to the three most important words: "I don't know." This poet, Wislawa Szymborska, cherishes that phrase. "It's small," she says, "but it flies on mighty wings." If Isaac Newton had never said, "I don't know," he would have never discovered gravity.
The good society accepts the uncertain and embraces the unknown. We need exploration, simple pleasures, surprises, and moments where our anxieties are forgotten. We need a society that provides for our basic needs so we're not constantly worried about survival. What we *don't* need is a society that's constantly being upended by shocks that force us to worry about the future. We've engineered an upside-down world where Starbucks stays the same, but rivers dry up and democracies collapse. We'd be better off with daily serendipity but stable structures.
If we can pull our societies back from the edge of chaos, how can we live better lives? Well, evolution can teach us something: that experimentation will bring us closer to flourishing.
A lot of despair comes from feeling powerless, like "I don't have any effect on the world!" But accepting the interconnectedness of everything means that everyone matters. We may not control anything, but we influence everything.
If we want to maximize our influence, we need to cooperate. Humans who work together create change together.
We have a choice between two strategies: explore versus exploit. To explore is to wander. To exploit is to race toward a known destination. Trying a new restaurant is exploring. Going to your favorite restaurant is exploiting.
These ideas are related to local versus global maximums. Imagine you're a mountain climber. You want to reach the highest possible elevation. You pick the highest peak in the Alps and climb it. Job done. But then you meet someone who climbed Everest. You reached the local maximum, unaware that a global maximum was waiting. Exploiting too soon means you get stuck climbing the local maximum.
But achieving the global maximum isn't always the best. Maybe the Alps are good enough. Sometimes all we need is the local maximum. Unless you're a foodie, constantly exploring new restaurants might leave you unsatisfied. Other times, trying to get to the highest point can be a mistake, especially when it's near a cliff. When the landscape changes, the logic of local and global maxima breaks down. In ever-changing terrain, it's useful to experiment randomly.
Through random tinkering, evolution has created solutions that are better than anything we could have come up with. If life had not been built on exploration, we'd still be bacteria. The unthinking engine of relentless experimentation has given rise to amazing diversity. Explore, then exploit, then explore, then exploit. To explore effectively, sometimes you must embrace uncertainty. Rather than trying to engineer better solutions, the wisdom of evolution is unleashed by turning to randomized solutions.
There's this group of people, the Kantu, who live in Borneo. They cultivate rice and rubber. Rice is fickle, but rubber is reliable. Because of that uncertainty, the "best" place to grow rice can't be predicted. They make a really interesting choice. They look for divine signs in the movement of sacred birds to determine where to plant rice. It's complex to the point of being effectively random. At first glance, randomness seems like a poor strategy for deciding where to plant food.
But when researchers studied the Kantu, they found that their crop failures were less common than other communities. In an uncertain environment, putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea. The Kantu have found a way to diversify their agriculture by randomizing the process. They aren't trying to optimize the process with flawed theories.
Some problems are "rubber problems," and others are "rice problems." Closed systems are stable—rubber problems—in which the best strategy is to optimize. But when you come up against an open, complex system—rice problems—you better be experimenting constantly. For rice problems, it's easy to think you've found the global maximum, only to fall off a cliff. The optimal solution over time may be a bit farther down the mountain, where it's still pretty high up, but not quite so precarious.
We rarely distinguish rubber problems from rice problems. Take baseball. It's been revolutionized by data analytics. In closed systems, those calculations are effective. In baseball, the only metric that matters is whether you win. The data nerds took over. Baseball became more optimized, but something happened. It became boring. Pitchers knew exactly where to throw the ball. Strikeouts increased. Baseball became two spreadsheets battling it out on a diamond. The sport was optimizing for the wrong thing. Sports are interesting because of uncertainty. Instead, the action became sterile. Baseball's fan base shrunk. Major League Baseball changed the rules to "de-moneyball" the game. The suits had solved the rubber problem, but fans wanted baseball to be more of a rice problem.
This saga was just a matter of sporting preference, but you get lulled into disaster if you mistake rice problems for rubber ones. Much more of our world is governed by rice problems than we believe. The best solution is often a healthy dose of randomized experimentation producing diverse solutions, with slack built in.
Just over a decade ago, researchers put tracking devices on fish and sharks to see how they moved around the sea. Astonishingly, their paths followed equations for random motion: Lévy walks and Brownian motion. A Lévy walk is small movements followed by a big movement. Brownian motion is just small movements. When sharks didn't know where to find their next meal, they entered explore mode—Lévy walks. But when they stumbled upon fish, they switched to Brownian motion.
Consider how we allocate research funding. It's impossible to know where research will lead. Research is, by its nature, exploration. But organizations want evidence of exploitation: "Tell us the destination if you want the money!" Studies have shown that research grant proposals that promise tangible discoveries are more likely to get funding. But they don't necessarily deliver that impact more often.
In the mid-1990s, Katalin KarikĂł believed her work had promise, so she applied for grants. She struck out each time. Venture capitalists deemed her ideas a waste of money. After these failures, her university gave her an ultimatum: quit or face demotion. KarikĂł persisted. We should be thankful she did. Her work, on mRNA, would soon save millions of lives, as it was the basis of the most effective coronavirus vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. She won a Nobel Prize.
To decide who gets grant money, we may be better off first setting a threshold to make sure that the proposals are serious and thoughtful. But beyond that threshold, some grant allocations should be made randomly. If we were certain what the next breakthrough would be, we should follow a strategy of exploiting knowledge. But since that certain world doesn't exist, we should sometimes use the power of randomness to explore the unknown.
Sometimes life's best flukes come from exploring a fresh, uncertain future. In closed systems with objective metrics geared toward problem-solving, moneyball everything. But for the rice problems of life—the areas of unavoidable uncertainty—treating them like a rubber problem can at worst be disastrous, and at best suck the joy out of life's awe-inspiring wonder.
These lessons are ignored in a culture obsessed with productivity, efficiency, and control. If there's no obvious output, then what's the point? But exploration also requires letting your thoughts drift without purpose. Millions treat undirected contemplation as a waste of time. A drive or commute must be filled with radio, chatter, or games, but rarely silence. Even thirty empty seconds while waiting in line at the grocery store beckons many of us to our smartphones. In one recent study, when participants were left alone with a device that could give them an electric shock, many opted to shock themselves rather than sit alone with their thoughts. One man shocked himself 190 times in less than ten minutes.
What happens when we let ourselves drift without direction? Moments of diversion, in which idleness envelops us, are often moments of brilliance. They provide us with insights when mankind "is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts." When our minds turn their gaze away from a problem, intellectual lightning strikes. Galileo's discovery that a pendulum could be used to measure time emerged in a quiet moment of watching a chandelier swing. Einstein said that many of his most important insights emerged while he was playing the violin. And the Wright brothers imagined their flying machine during a relaxing picnic while watching buzzards.
The mathematician Henri Poincaré swore by the magic that happens when you don't assert control. For fifteen days, he toiled with a problem, but to no avail. But then, he drank black coffee and couldn't sleep. Once he stopped trying to tame the problem, "Ideas arose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked." By the next morning, the solutions flowed out of him. By chasing control, we trap ourselves. By letting go just a little, we may liberate not only ourselves, but our best ideas.
Poincaré is the mathematician who paved the way for chaos theory, which would later become known by the image of an intertwined world, in which hurricanes could be swirled into existence by a single butterfly flapping its wings.
The butterfly offers us an end to our saga. In North America, the monarch butterfly overwinters in the highlands of Mexico. In the spring, a new generation is born, and they begin their journey north. But the journey is too long for any individual monarch to complete. Instead, the migration is an interconnected journey, each life started where the parents stopped, each butterfly part of an endless relay across generations. Every butterfly is shaped by history, their lives emerging from a chrysalis that was created at a specific time and place by decisions accumulating from long-dead ancestors. They, like us, produce unknown ripple effects with their lives. They may cause hurricanes or provide a moment of beauty to a child who pauses to gaze at them.
We are like those butterflies, and they are like us, part of a chaotic, networked unity we call existence. "When we try to pick out anything by itself," the naturalist John Muir once said, "we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." We are each hitched to one another, which yields a gift: that everything we do matters, including whatever you decide to do now, when you close this, and go out to explore that wonderful, maddening, infinitely complex world that we call home.