David

“The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos—which is to
say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. Chaos has a
nature all of its own. That nature is experienced as affective valence, at first exposure, not
as objective property. If something unknown or unpredictable occurs, while we are
carrying out our motivated plans, we are first surprised. That surprise—which is a
combination of apprehension and curiosity—comprises our instinctive emotional
response to the occurrence of something we did not desire. The appearance of something
unexpected is proof that we do not know how to act—by definition, as it is the production
of what we want that we use as evidence for the integrity of our knowledge. If we are
somewhere we don’t know how to act, we are (probably) in trouble—we might learn
something new, but we are still in trouble.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief