Where Control Belongs

Most of us hate being left hanging.

The days between a medical test and the results, when every buzz of your phone makes your stomach drop. Waiting to hear back about an exam or an application. A delayed flight where the departures board just says "TBD." A message that matters, marked Read, followed by nothing at all.

The obvious explanation is fear. We're worried the test will show something, the grade will be bad, the flight will be cancelled, the reply won't be the one we wanted. We dread the bad outcome, so we hate not knowing.

That's true, as far as it goes. But you've probably noticed something strange. When the answer finally comes, even when it's bad news, part of you relaxes. Not because you're happy. Because you can finally stop thinking about it.

Sometimes it isn't the bad outcome we can't stand. It's having no outcome at all.

Knowing it'll hurt is easier

In 2016, researchers at University College London set out to measure how much uncertainty really gets to us.1

They had 45 people play a simple computer game. The screen showed a row of rocks, and some of the rocks had snakes hiding underneath. Before turning each one over, players guessed whether there would be a snake. If there was, they got a mild electric shock on the hand.

The catch was that the odds kept shifting. Sometimes players could be fairly sure a rock hid a snake, sometimes fairly sure it didn't, and sometimes they had no idea. All the while, the researchers tracked how uncertain each person was and how stressed they were: how tense they said they felt, how wide their pupils got, how much they sweated.

Stress didn't simply climb with the chance of getting shocked. When people were confident there was no snake, they were calm. When they were confident there was one, they were fairly calm too. Stress peaked when the odds were close to fifty-fifty, when they honestly couldn't tell. Their palms got sweaty not at the moment of the shock, but in the not-knowing.

Knowing you're about to get hurt, it turns out, is easier than wondering whether you will.

Why the not-knowing wears us down

I can think of at least three reasons.

First, it runs in the background. It's like an app you can't close. You're not thinking about it every second, but you know it's open, quietly eating up memory. Bad news is a relief partly because it finally shuts that app down.

Second, it freezes everything downstream. If the answer is yes, you'll do this. If it's no, you'll do that. Until you know, every next step is on hold. Often it's not the one thing you care about so much as the whole plan that can't move.

Third, it messes with your sense of order. Some people need the world to have a definite shape: decisions made, dates set, relationships defined. Psychologists call it the need for cognitive closure. I'm one of those people. For us, "not yet" is uncomfortable all by itself, whether the answer ends up good or bad.

So why do I love not knowing when I travel?

This is where I caught myself in a contradiction. In everyday life I like everything planned. But when I travel, I barely plan at all. Where to go, what to eat, which side street to wander down, I figure it out when I get there. And I love it.

I think it's because there are two kinds of uncertainty. One is about what you might lose. The other is about what might happen. The first feels like risk. The second feels like discovery.

The hardest kind of uncertainty is usually three things at once: it matters a lot, you don't know how it will turn out, and there's nothing you can do about it right now. Waiting on test results is exactly that. Not knowing on a trip is the opposite. Very little is at stake, and you have plenty of say. The café's closed? Find another one. The street's a dead end? Turn around. Same unknown, but here it feels like freedom.

Maybe what scares us was never uncertainty itself. It's being uncertain with no cards left to play.

What an option teaches you

That reminded me of an idea from finance: the option.

An option is basically the right to decide later. Say a house is worth $1 million today. You pay a small fee for the right to buy it for $1 million three months from now. You can, but you don't have to.

If the price climbs to $1.3 million, you buy it for a million. If it drops to $700,000, you walk away, and all you've lost is that small fee. The downside has a floor. The upside has no ceiling.

That's why, in finance, the more uncertain the future is, the more an option can be worth. If you're holding one, volatility isn't a threat. It's an opportunity.

Life works much the same way. Picture two people facing the same unresolved situation, with exactly the same odds. One thinks, "If this falls through, I'm done." The other thinks, "If this falls through, I'll find another way." The second person doesn't have better odds. They're just holding an option.

People who handle uncertainty well aren't necessarily more optimistic. They may simply trust that they have somewhere else to go.

The candle, the rock and the fire

This is where Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes in.

In The Black Swan, Taleb argues that the events that shape the world most are often the rare ones nobody saw coming.2 Since you can't predict them, he suggests asking a different question: when the unexpected happens, what happens to me?

In Antifragile, he sorts things into three kinds, depending on how they respond to shocks:3

• Fragile things break. The more volatility, the more damage. Think of a wine glass.
• Robust things hold up. They take the hit, but they don't get any better for it. Think of a rock.
• Antifragile things get stronger under stress. Think of a muscle, which grows precisely because you strain it.

He has a line I love: "Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire."

And for Taleb, a big part of being antifragile is exactly what an option gives you: a limited downside and an open upside.

That changed how I think about all of this. We can't make the future certain, but we can make ourselves less fragile. The first step is to be the rock: don't bet everything on a single outcome, keep some savings and a plan B, invest in a few relationships you can lean on. The next step is to let uncertainty work for you: build skills that come with you wherever you go, and take small, cheap bets that could pay off big. Then, when the unexpected blows in, it doesn't have to be the wind that puts out the candle. It can be the wind that gets the fire going.

Put control in your response, not the outcome

We all need some sense of control. The question is where we put it.

The psychologist Ellen Langer ran a famous study with lottery tickets.4 People who picked their own numbers were far more reluctant to sell their ticket than people who were handed one at random, as if choosing the numbers made them more likely to win. She called it the illusion of control. Refreshing your inbox over and over while you wait for news is the same thing. It doesn't change anything. It just makes us feel a little less at the mercy of chance.

The people who stay steady while they wait aren't calm by nature, I think. They tend to do three things.

They know when the doing is done. Is there anything practical left to do? If so, do it. If not, that part is over. A lot of us are in the waiting phase while our brains are still stuck in the doing phase, so we keep checking, googling, refreshing. None of that is action. It just feels like action.

They don't confuse worrying with caring. It's easy to feel that if you stop thinking about something, you must not care enough. But caring about something doesn't mean handing it all of your attention, all of the time.

And most important, they put their sense of control in their response rather than the outcome. Not "I'm sure it'll go well," but "If it doesn't, I know what I'll do next." The more you trust yourself to handle whatever comes, the less you need to know in advance what it will be.

Control and agency aren't the same thing. Control needs the world to go according to plan, which makes it brittle, because the world keeps breaking our plans. Agency asks only one thing of you: that whatever happens, you can still decide what to do next.

Don't let one unknown take over everything

The real danger of uncertainty usually isn't the open question itself. It's how far it spreads.

It starts with not knowing how something will turn out. Then, because you don't know, you're on your phone all evening. Because you're anxious, you stay up too late. The next day you're wiped out and get nothing done, and because you got nothing done, you feel even worse. By that point, what's running your life isn't the outcome anymore. It's one variable you can't control taking over all the ones you can.

So I've started to think of my life in three layers. At the center are the anchors: sleep, meals, exercise, the handful of basics I try to keep standing no matter what. Around them is a flexible layer: how much I get done today, when and how, all of which can bend. And on the outside is everything I let go of: when people reply, what they think, whether things turn out the way I hoped. Those were never mine to manage.

A steady core, a flexible middle, and room for the unknown at the edges.

While you wait

Think back to those moments we started with. The test results will still take three business days. The board will still say "TBD." We don't get to decide when the answer comes.

What we do get to decide is what our lives look like until it does. Eat, sleep, get on with whatever's in front of us, and keep a few cards in hand.

The goal isn't to get rid of every unanswered question. It's to keep living while the answer is still on its way.