Wouldn’t it be awful if we knew! Yes, there are some things that we can say will (almost certainly) happen – but for the most part tomorrow is a mystery – and all of our tomorrows after that! I may be wrong, but if we knew everything that was ever going to happen in advance it would take all the fun out of each and every experience.
Of course, over recent months I have been in a situation which was wholly unpredictable – well at least from my point of view. That does colour my thinking a bit – but it was more the case that it solidified what I already thought and enabled me to fully understand the folly of attempting to ‘predict’ the future.
This – however – may seem like a very strange point of view to take – given that a significant part of my daily work involves building predictive models. How can this be reconciled?
Well the simple fact is that – as I always say – the models are not there to tell us what the future holds, but to help us understand the possibilities for the future. When we start to believe that we are getting anywhere close to ‘knowing’ then that is the time when we should start to question our motivations and our sensibilities.
Now the paradox that emerges when we start to think that it is a good idea that we do NOT know everything in advance is that the things that worry and stress us the most are those about which we know least! How often do we say “its the not knowing that is most worrying” or something similar?
Certainly as I journeyed through my treatment it was often the “not knowing” what particular things would entail that made me feel nervous – often way out of proportion for the actual thing when it came around. Naturally there are things that happen to us that we do not want to happen, or that cause us pain, or that cause us sorrow – but can you honestly think of ANY situation where you could reflect on something and say that all that worry and stress beforehand improve things at all?
That’s not quite the same as suggesting that “knowing” would be no better – of course there are many things that are much better when we are prepared for them – but – and this is the crucial point for this discourse – even when we are prepared we still do not truly ‘know’ that we have prepared correctly because at any time something could come along and derail the whole process one way or another.
As I have progresses through life I have increasingly realised that the quote from Einstein that is the ‘tagline’ for this blog is so very true. Learning doesn’t really ever complete our knowledge, it merely opens up those areas of “not knowing” that we were previously unaware of. As we unpeel a layer of the covering of ignorance that surrounds us, we do not find that we suddenly know everything – instead we discover questions that we hadn’t thought to ask before.
So – if the thing that scares us the most is the “fear of the unknown” how can we reconcile it with the fact that we cannot possibly know the future – or at least all of the future. Actually – is there any such thing as certainty in knowing the future? Perhaps not. Those things that we are sure of are – perhaps – only certainties if…. Even the most certain thing may actually harbour just a bit of “what if” doubt.
What is the most certain thing that you know about the future? Answers to that will vary, but what they will have in common is that it is possible to posit situations that would render them less certain.
Another, similar, incompatibility is that as we become more and more precise in our prediction we become less and less likely to be right! I will die – is a reasonably certain thing to state. I will die in the next ten years – is less certain, but certainly possible. I will die tomorrow – has now become unlikely, although you never know… Which is precisely the point.
I am not advocating anyone adopting an extreme stance on this – it is clearly not going to be very helpful to get to the point where you cannot do anything because you cannot be sure about what will happen next. All that I am trying to tease out is that in everything we do we need to understand that no matter how good our information and knowledge is – it is not perfect. Certainly that is true about the future – but it is also true about the past.
Now the point of this post is to suggest that far from being a bad thing – this lack of “certainty” about what will happen next in our lives is actually what makes life worth living. Many of my previous posts have touched on the interconnectedness of the people on this planet. If we knew everything about the future that would also imply that we knew everything about everyone else – since their actions – even their thoughts – will impact the future, and possibly our future.
Now – that is a bit of a scary thought to me. Whilst I love getting to understand people, I am sure that I would not want to be in the position where I could infallibly predict their every thought, word and action.
So – we do not “know” everything – there will always be things that could be described as mysteries. That should make us all happy. It means there is always something else to learn – although, of course, there are some things that will forever remain a mystery as they are – as far as we are concerned – unknowable as they are outside of what we can conceive.
There were two main triggers for this post – one was someone who said that they sometimes worried about “not knowing”; the other was a book that cautioned against thinking that you “do know”. I think that these actually link together quite neatly.
If you think that you “know” what is going to happen then you will plan for that eventuality. All will be well – until the inevitable “something unexpected” happens. Someone wise (Helmuth von Moltke the Elder) once said that “no plan survives the first contact with the enemy”. The all falls to pieces and – since no other alternatives were considered we are left with “not knowing” the next course of action.
Conversely – if instead you consider yourself ‘ignorant’ of knowledge of the possible outcomes a different strategy is required. Now, instead of taking action (forming a plan) that aims for a specific outcome you take actions (forming a much more flexible plan) that minimises the risk, whilst maximising the opportunity.
I have a feeling that this is going to become another of the ‘constant themes’ within this blog along with interconnectedness and a few others.
OK – so that was maybe a bit opaque – a more specific (if trivial) example. On our way home from a recent holiday we saw a sign indicating that the road was closed several miles ahead and that there was a diversion. Given that most seemed to be ignoring the sign it was entirely possible that this was something that should have been removed – a leftover from a previous incident.
We had two choices – one was to ignore the sign (like everyone else) and hope the road was open – with the possibility of a long delay or having to take an even longer diversion – or – we could follow the diversion, thereby slowing our journey somewhat, but not by much, and seeing a part of the country we would otherwise have missed.
There was a downside to the latter – a known, definite, downside – but there was also a possibility of a payback by discovering something new.
Which option did I take? I will leave you to guess…..
So – as we go through life “not knowing” we have the opportunity to maximise our learning opportunities – to discover new things – to travel paths to different places. All those would be lost if we were on a fixed, known path to the inevitable endpoint.