Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty

Most people aren’t risk-averse.

They are ambiguity-averse.

Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it?

But it can explain a lot about human behavior. Neurologically, we have software programmed to avoid uncertainty. During our hunter-gather days, uncertainty in our environment would mean certain death.

Not knowing whether a predator was nearby or a rival tribe would invade would cause our ancestors an increase in pain and stress. More than would be appropriate in these situations.

Despite our enormous technological progress and the threat of invasion and death by predation are dramatically lower, we still have not evolved from our ancestral aversion to uncertainty.

Recently, researchers have found that uncertainty is even more stressful than knowing something bad is definitely going to happen. As the old classic saying goes, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know”

The study finds that “unpredictability and uncontrollability are central features of stressful experiences for humans.” The researchers found that varied electrical shocks delivered at arbitrary times were more stressful to rats than when they were delivered at a consistent rate.

This is the same for humans. Not knowing when something is going to happen is often more stressful than not knowing what is going to happen.

The aversion we have to uncertainty can help answer questions like:

• Why do people stay in the same job long after they stopped learning or being challenged?

• Why do people stay in romantic relationships that have long stopped being loving?

• Why do people constantly surround themselves with toxic friends and family?

The answer?

To avoid ambiguity.

While these situations are bad, they aren’t bad enough to want to embrace the uncertainty of entrepreneurship or the loneliness of being alone.

Tim Ferris has said,

“People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

I bet you can think of a time in your life when you were unhappy and wanted to change, but the fear of uncertainty held you back. Stopped you from taking action. Prevented any personal development or growth.

Let’s take the first example of staying in a job you’ve outgrown.

In this day and age, staying in the same job to learn a narrow set of skills in a niche industry is one of the riskiest things you can do. If the pandemic taught me one thing, no company or organization owes their employees anything.

My own workplace went through a brutal restructuring that saw almost half the organization lose their jobs. Some people were caught with their pants down. Some thought they would never lose their job.

You are one restructure, pandemic or recession away from being left out in the dark. In my situation, most people were still quite young and could find other jobs easily.

But imagine if you were 50 years old and had no other skills outside of an industry that is rapidly being automated away or simply does not exist anymore.

Viewed this way, entrepreneurship seems far less risky than a 9–5 job but far more ambiguous. There is no guaranteed success. And that’s what prevents most people from changing.

But looking back on your life again, I can bet that you have had way more successes than failures when you took a risk and fully embraced uncertainty.

The uncertainty of approaching your future partner at a bar, the risk of putting yourself out there for a new job or promotion. The ambiguity of backing yourself with your own business.

“If you aren’t willing to risk the uncertainty of change then you’ve basically accepted staying unhappy in that situation. Essentially you’re still risking something — you’re risking your future happiness,” writes Coach Carly

All of life’s greatest rewards come at the expense of feeling comfortable. One of my mentors who I’ve known since I was 16 years old always says to me:

“The amount of success you will enjoy in life is directly proportional to the amount of uncertainty you’re willing to embrace.”

You Need To Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development because success is something you attract by the person you become — Jim Rohn

Feeling uncomfortable? Good. That means you are on the right track.

If you never feel challenged, fearful, or scared are you really challenging yourself? Comfort only breeds complacency. And complacency is an environment infertile to personal growth.

Even when you are shitting yourself, it tends to work out in the end, doesn’t it? Maybe not always the way you want to be, but it still works out somehow. You become a new you. A better you. One more equipped to handle challenges.

People tend to underestimate their ability to adapt, despite having thousands of years of evolutionary evidence in front of them. Human beings are the only animal found in every nook and cranny of this world.

Why? Because we are able to adapt our diet, lifestyle, and way of living to our environment. So, what’s changed with humans now? Nothing really. We haven’t lost the ability to adapt, only the mindset to do so.

Even when you do fall short, the uncomfortable journey shapes you. The struggle forges your character. You become a new version of yourself. One that is now capable of attracting more success.

“When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don’t usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeal that seems most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering,” writes David Brooks

People we think of as wise have almost always endured a season of suffering through uncertainty and ambiguity. Most people don’t come out healed; they come out different.

You’ll start to realize that the discomfort that comes through embracing uncertainty becomes a gift. Not like the gift of happiness, which society is obsessed with maximizing.

The latter brings pleasure, but the former cultivates your potential.

Uncertainty Planning

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” — Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister

How do you confront uncertainty? By action. Action is the antidote to being paralyzed by the sea of uncertainty. The feeling of being in a boat dropped in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight.

In Tim Ferriss’s Ted Talk on Fear-Setting, he describes the process of planning for your fears, not your goals. Start with the worst-case scenario in mind and work backward from there.

Why?

Writing down your fears is a great way to visualize all the bad things that could happen to you, so you become less afraid of taking action.

Often your fears are unfounded, illegitimate, and designed to keep you safe. Once you start to write them down and plan for them, you start to see how illogical and unlikely most of them are to occur.

Most fears can be easily mitigated or managed. Most of the worst-case scenarios have happened to other people and they have managed their way around it and so can you.

But that’s the power fear of uncertainty has over us.

Fear makes us sacrifice the mean for the variance.

We don’t pursue opportunities that would improve our lives dramatically because of the off chance that something might go wrong.

For instance, pursuing your passion is guaranteed to increase your life satisfaction by 80% but there is a 10% chance you might fail. Most people choose to avoid the 10% and stay in their dead-end job.

It is not a logical problem, it is an emotional one.

What can you do?

Exposure works best. By constantly pushing yourself into positions of uncertainty you start to realize that the fear isn’t that bad.

Take the Tim Ferriss Fear Testing Checklist

Step One:

Make three vertical lists with the following titles and questions:

1. Define — What is the worst thing that could happen?

2. Prevent — How could you prevent each thing from happening?

3. Repair — If the worst-case scenario, how could you fix it? Who could you contact? Has anyone else figured this out before?

Step Two: Conservative Success

What might be the benefits of an attempt or partial success? What skills might you learn? What mindset would you be able to cultivate?

Step Three: The Cost of Inaction

This is the most important step.

“Humans are very good at considering what might go wrong if they try something new. But what people don’t consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo” says Tim Ferriss

Make three lists of the costs of your inaction. In other words, if I avoid doing this thing what might I miss out on emotionally, physically, financially, etc?

Write down the cost of staying the same over:

• 6 months

• 1 year

• 3 years

You’ll start to realize that the cost of inaction often heavily outweighs the risk of action, even when adjusted for emotional and financial factors.

Uncertainty is a tool you can harness to enormously benefit your life.

Use it wrongly and it can keep you locked in. Constantly fearful of any change. Good or bad. Use it correctly and you can reap enormous rewards in your personal and professional life.

The choice is yours.

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” — Nelson Mandela

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