Certainty Archives - Farther to Go!

You Give Truth a Bad Name

January 10, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Not necessarily you, personally. But maybe you. If so, you should stop doing that.

When I came across a promising article posted on a writers’ website titled “The World Needs Writers Now More than Ever” I could do nothing but nod in agreement, although my perspective runs more along the lines of when hasn’t the world needed writers?

I started reading with great expectations—which were immediately dashed when the author referred to writers as “truth tellers.” She says:

Most of us write to discover what we think and believe about the world, and, in the process, we arrive at a certain kind of truth. We share that truth with the world through our words.

That’s a nice idea, but she’s giving writers too much credit for high-mindedness. Far too many of them are active truth dissemblers.

But…fair enough. It’s the case for some writers I know and it’s frequently the case for me to use writing to explore rather than to explain. It’s a practice available to anyone that I wish more people would take advantage of. But a majority of people in this world, including writers, are far more interested in what they know than in what they don’t know. And they write from a position of absoluteness, as if what they have to say is the final word on how it is, what to do about it, and who is right and who is wrong. “A certain kind of truth” needs more definition.

I was further dismayed by a subheading midway through the piece claiming that all of us “have to tell our truth.” Things that are true are factual. There is evidence for them. Something happened or it didn’t happen. It either is or it isn’t. Or maybe we don’t know. Our lack of knowledge has no effect on the truth. There is no truth that is exclusively yours or mine. What this writer appears to be talking about is personal experience which is exclusively yours or mine, even when aspects of it seems to be shared.

However, I expect more from a writer, especially one writing about the craft of writing on a writing website. Personal experience and “truth” are not one and the same. As a writer, that’s a distinction she ought to assist people in making. Conflating experience and truth is what gives truth a bad name. Personalizing truth makes it wonky, unstable, vague.

If we can’t agree on what truth is, then it is hopeless to expect that we can ever recognize truth and respond to or deal effectively with it. It was snowing 10 minutes ago—a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it bit of flurries, but snowing nonetheless. The fact that someone indoors didn’t notice it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means it wasn’t part of that person’s experience.

Personally, I don’t really like snow, but that doesn’t mean snow is bad even though my experience of it is often unpleasant.

Every child in a multiple-child family has a different experience of their parents. They tell different stories with different details and different meanings and different outcomes. None of them are true because there’s no such thing as a true story. We are all personalizing. Well, to be more accurate, our brain is personalizing.

It is processing sensory data through our personal mental model which contains our personal beliefs and making personal interpretations that give rise to our personal experience. Your experience is your experience and mine is mine. Just because it feels “real” doesn’t mean it’s an accurate reflection of reality. If someone doesn’t experience their own experiences as real, they are likely in a dissociative state, which is not healthy. But claiming that one’s experience is or represents the truth is essentially lying.

We are being sold the idea that our experience is our truth as a way of encouraging us to not deny our experience, to give it voice. This is all well and good, but not if in the process we actually disempower ourselves by failing to take into account that we play a role in how our brain creates our experiences. Besides, if our experience represents the truth, then it is not changeable. We have no power or agency in the matter. The world happens to us and we can’t do anything about it. That is not a desirable state of affairs. And it’s not true.

Storytelling

There are types of experiences that humans tend to have—that we are wired to have, so to speak. Some of them may be given less validity by the society or culture in which we live. Sharing such experiences can validate them, which can bring them out into the open, assist individuals in recognizing others have similar experiences, and broaden the understanding of who we all are (as humans).

Stories pack an emotional punch, or they can, that non-fiction does far less easily. So telling a story of your own experience or of someone else’s can have a profound effect. You could say it represents “a certain kind of truth,” but that truth is abstract, not to be confused or conflated with “the truth.” It is a true experience. You or I or someone lived through it. It is what you or I or someone felt. It is how we perceived it.

Some may even consider abstract truth to be more important and certainly more profound than mere facts. Reading stories about other people’s experiences—especially in the form of literary fiction—has been repeatedly shown to help develop social acuity, emotional intelligence, compassion, understanding, and critical thinking, among other things. In short, it can make us better people.

But it’s vital that we know how to separate fact from fiction and experience from reality and that we all have a basic agreement as to what we’re talking about when we talk about truth. Our experience is real, but it is not the truth.

Uncertainty: Learning to Live with Butterflies

January 22, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The unconscious part of our brain abhors ambiguity and uncertainty. And patience is not its middle name. That’s unfortunate.

We work to eliminate as much uncertainty as we can as quickly as possible. But when we eliminate uncertainty, we necessarily eliminate novelty. And novelty is the starting point for creation and innovation. In eliminating uncertainty, we kill our shot at brilliance. We become derivative. All in the name of not having to learn to live with butterflies. —Jonathan Fields

In our haste to return to the illusory state of certainty, we tend to do things like jump to conclusions, accept the first answer or explanation that comes to mind (consistent with our mental model), act prematurely, or immobilize ourselves in endless rounds of rumination. (Rumination feels like problem-solving but it’s the opposite: problem-prolonging, if you will.)

By refusing to allow ourselves to simply observe the discomfort that accompanies ambiguity and uncertainty, we often deny ourselves another experience: the pure joy of the aha! moment when a solution presents itself. That may take an hour or several days—or even longer—but suddenly what was murky and inchoate becomes bright and clear. The path ahead becomes obvious.

I say the solution “presents itself” because although we tend to take credit for coming up with the brilliant idea or flash of insight, the part of our brain we identify with had little to do with it. It’s the unconscious that figured it out and then clued us in.

It’s interesting that the unconscious is equally capable of jumping to quick conclusions and of wrestling with an issue long after we’ve depleted our conscious capacity to think about it. In situations where a wrong conclusion isn’t likely to make a huge difference, jumping to one is probably more efficient. But when the issue or problem or project is bigger, it’s worth letting the unconscious mull it over for a while.

One of the reasons waiting this process out makes us squirm is that we have no control over it. It isn’t going to occur by the force of our will or on our timetable. When we try to make it happen we usually just end up getting in our own way and muddling the process.

Certainty Is Not Clarity

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s a big difference between being unclear—not knowing which step to take—and being uncertain—not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be. It’s important to distinguish between the two and to be able to recognize whether it’s a lack of clarity or the fear of uncertainty that’s getting in the way.

Certainty is an illusion—a somewhat comforting illusion, but an illusion nevertheless. There’s no way to predict the future, and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe. So if we wait until we are certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Clarity, unlike certainty, is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, since the unconscious part of our brain is biased against uncertainty, we are biased against it, too. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:

Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome by adopting an attitude of curiosity.
Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

It isn’t easy, but rather than trying to get back to comfortable and certain as quickly as possible, we can develop a tolerance for the discomfort. We can even learn to appreciate the uncertainty and the opportunity it presents for novelty. Whatever is on the other side of our current distress may be unimaginable to us now, but it could be brilliant. Why take the chance of missing out on something brilliant just to avoid feeling a little uncomfortable?

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty

November 3, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Although we frequently use the terms interchangeably, certainty is not a synonym for clarity.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

There’s another big problem with trying to be certain, which is that we can’t be. There’s no way to predict the future—and randomness plays a much bigger role in our lives than we want to believe—so we can’t be certain about the outcome of anything we do. We end up tying ourselves in knots and wasting precious mental resources chasing an illusion.

So if we wait until we can be certain of the outcome of our actions, we’ll never act because the outcome can never be certain. There are no guarantees in life.

The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. —Robert Burns

Unlike certainty, clarity is not an emotional state. It’s a state of mind: unclouded, unobstructed, unambiguous. Unlike certainty, clarity isn’t arrived at via a tortuous route. Unfortunately, the unconscious part of our brain (System 1) is biased against uncertainty, and so we are biased against it, as well. This is another example of our brain using us instead of the other way around.

What you can do:

Practice tolerating uncertainty and not being attached to the outcome.

Learn to distinguish between being unclear (not knowing which step to take) and being uncertain (not knowing what the outcome of taking that step will be).

Additional reading: 12 Signs that You Lack Clarity

Anger, Adrenaline, and Arrogance: Addiction to Certainty

September 21, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 8 Comments

Strong emotions—the ones that amp up adrenaline and cortisol levels—increase our confidence. When we’re angry, for example, we’re more likely to feel certain about whatever position we’ve taken. We’re sure we not only know what we’re talking about, but also that we’re right and any other parties involved are wrong.

This feeling of certainty is an illusion, generated by the amphetamine-like effects of anger, which include kicking our metabolism into a higher gear while narrowing our mental focus. The unconscious part of our brain has a natural tendency to discount anything that doesn’t jibe with what we believe. It already automatically narrows our focus. Adding anger (or actual amphetamines, for that matter) to the mix further constricts our focus, sometimes closing our mind altogether.

When we’re angry, we filter out anything that doesn’t support our position. We focus on one or two aspects of a situation, sometimes taking them entirely out of context, and ignore the rest. Our confidence swells, bolstered by the boost of adrenaline, into over-confidence, even arrogance.

Our brain craves certainty and being right. This can be difficult to compensate for under the best of circumstances. When we’re emotionally aroused, it can be impossible—especially when we don’t recognize what’s going on. We’re used to thinking that the level of confidence we have about something is an accurate indicator of whether or not we’re right about it. Sometimes we are right. But the unconscious part of our brain isn’t concerned with such petty details. It’s less interested in whether we’re actually right and more interested in whether we feel right.

The illusion of certainty can be hard to let go of. Who wants to feel uncertain? Who wants to admit they’re wrong? Who wants to think the powerful sense of confidence they feel isn’t altogether reliable? Too often, we do whatever we can, whatever we have to do, to maintain the illusion of certainty. We refuse to give up the fight, no matter what damage it causes to us or to other people. We’d rather be right than happy. We’d rather be right than free. We’re so addicted to certainty that instead of using our brain, we’re willing to let our brain use us.

Embrace Uncertainty

May 19, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

Embrace Uncertainty

We are wired to crave certainty. For some of us, that means focusing our efforts on getting and maintaining safety and security. For others, it means hedging our bets in regard to anything we undertake. For still others, it means not even starting something without a guarantee of a satisfactory outcome. And for many, it means not stepping out of a narrow and well-worn zone of comfort and familiarity.

We’ve come up with a lot of explanations for the behaviors that go along with trying to fulfill our craving for certainty. In fact, one of the reasons we like explanations is that they make us feel like we understand, and that feeds our craving for certainty. A lot of our explanations are stories spun by the interpreter in our brain. They may be quite wide of the mark in terms of accuracy, so what they’re really giving us is a false sense of certainty. Unfortunately, as far as our brain is concerned—which means as far as we are concerned—a false sense of certainty is almost always preferable to any amount of uncertainty.

Yet people do take enormous risks and undertake challenges and ventures where the outcome is very much in doubt. I’m not talking about the compulsion for engaging in thrill-seeking high-risk behavior. I’m talking about doing something that’s never been done before—like the Wright brothers did—or doing something to bring about change—like Nelson Mandela did. Or doing something we’ve never done before. I’m talking about creating something: a piece of art, a business, a different approach, a change in one corner of the world.

When you start out to do something you have never done before, you can’t know what the outcome will be. Our unconscious causes us to pay more attention to what we might lose than to what we might gain. In trying to avoid loss, we shy away from taking risks or accepting challenges even when the potential payoff might be magnificent. But our unconscious is also notoriously bad at calculating odds, and it doesn’t take randomness and luck into account—both of which are far more significant factors to any outcome than we’d like to believe.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.

Life, by its very nature, is risky and enormously uncertain. The truth is that there are no guarantees for any of us for anything. If we want to do more than survive, we might have to step out on a limb once in a while. We might even have to take a leap.

Last week, I was at a luncheon where one of the participants went around the room offering everyone a chance to take one of the tiny cards inside a wicker basket. The card I pulled had “success” on the front. Inside it said:

Anything I’ve ever done that ultimately was worthwhile…initially scared me to death. –Betty Bender

If there’s something you want to do and the only thing holding you back is uncertainty, try imagining a world where all is preordained, everything is known in advance, and there is no possibility of surprise. Is that really a world you’d want to live in?

[NOTE: This post is the fifth in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling, Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It, Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, and Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game.]

Storytelling

Certainty Is Not Clarity

What you can do:

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