But discomfort with uncertainty manifests as fatalism, pessimism, doomerism, despair—or sometimes as optimism—when it pretends that we know for certain what will happen. It reduces the vastness of the unknown into the known, the false certainty that pretends to know as a means of ignoring the fact that we don’t. The likely happens often, but the unlikely happens often enough that it cannot be disregarded. The things that seem obvious, predictable, inevitable in hindsight were often regarded beforehand as impossible or unlikely, and an accurate memory of that equips us to aspire again to what
...more
