Why You Should Be Grateful for Uncertainty

And why you should view it as an opportunity, sometimes even a gift.

Uncertainty is not all bad. Far from it. It can be a gift that forces you to actively write the story of your life.

Imagine this hypothetical life:

You’re born into a well-to-do family. Your mother’s a professor at Princeton, your father a partner at a successful law firm. Your parents’ families include Princeton, Yale, and Harvard alumni. You, a great student, get into Yale, then Harvard Law School. Eventually, you join your father’s law firm, which now has an office in New York City. You marry a nice gentleman, have three children, move to Scarsdale, NY, where you buy a beautiful home.

Seems like an awesome life, right? But it could also be an unfulfilling life. It depends on why you made the choices you made. Did you take the path of least resistance over and over again? Did you opt for what was expected and had proved to work for your family?

Was avoiding uncertainty one of the main drivers of your choices?

When your default is the safest choice, the story of your life tends to be predictable and written for you.

Every life is pre-determined to a large extent by circumstances of birth: your parents’ level of education and income, where you’re born (your “zip code”, as they say), your race and gender.

Still, there’s a lot we get to choose within the general parameters of our birth. Often, we don’t even consider many of the choices we do have because we just follow the easy path, the one with the most predictable outcome.

Sometimes life unfolds for months, years, and even decades in this way, and we’re able to avoid uncertainty.

Inevitably, however, there comes a time when life throws everyone a curveball. Sometimes it even throws one to an entire community, country, and continent. Every now and again, all of humanity is plunged into the same whirlpool of uncertainty. We’re living through one such whirlpool of course: the pandemic.

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