The good kind of Uncertainty is called ...

There is a stretch of pavement between the park and her door. You have actually walked this stretch a hundred times, but never like this. She is saying something about her dog, you have lost the thread of it, because underneath the words there is one question and it has eaten everything else. Are you going to kiss her.

She is walking half a step closer than a friend would walk and with a slower pace almost saying, I don't want this to be over yet. But not enough to be sure of anything.

You feel the uncertainty in your bones, but you are not unhappy about the situation you are in. It is the most alive you have been all week. Years from now the memory of you eating cereal this morning, spilling tea on your desk and all the other mundane aspects of this day will be gone. But the few minutes leading up to you two standing at her door filled with uncertainty will feel like yesterday, even many years later. Because when you first saw her two days earlier you had a special feeling about her and who she might become.

The offer

Let's run an experiment. Someone offers you a deal. You get the script for your whole life. Every conversation comes with its transcript already printed. The walk to her door, you would know the end of it even before you stumbled into her in the fruit aisle of your local grocery store two days before your date.

In return you get a life that never blindsides you. No bad news you did not see coming. No letter you are afraid to open, because you read it years ago. No phone ringing at a strange hour, from an unknown number that creates a feeling of unease the moment you see the call on the phone. Every hard thing in your life, already braced for years in advance.

Would you take this deal?

Most say they don't like uncertainty, at the same time my feeling is that not many would enter this deal to get rid of uncertainty.

Paying good money

There is an argument to be made that we love uncertainty. We sometimes even pay for it.

A film is a machine for keeping something from you and then releasing it slowly. You are paying for the gap between the question and the answer (Loewenstein, 1994). That gap has a name when you buy it on purpose. Suspense. And when someone hands you the answer early, with no gap, you feel robbed. We call that person a spoiler and the word is exact, as something of value was spilled.

Or watch children play. No money on the table, nothing much at stake, yet the game only works for as long as nobody knows who wins. Adults are the same. We have only learned to dress it up, calling it strategy and skill when the thing that keeps us in our seats is the very thing that keeps the child in theirs. The whole architecture of play is engineered uncertainty. The moment the not-knowing is gone, so is the game.

So sometimes we pay good money to be kept in the dark. On the flipside we sometimes switch on every light trying to illuminate the very last corner, in the attempt to eliminate the last shadow of uncertainty.

Friday afternoon

Friday afternoon feels better than Sunday evening, but the hours are made of the same minutes. The difference is that on Friday the weekend has not happened yet. It is still in the pluripotent state, still the latent potential of everything it could become. The good one, the wasted one or maybe the one where something happens that nobody could have planned. By Sunday night it has collapsed into the single version it turned out to be.

So on a deeper level we love uncertainty as a proxy for optionality and openness. In other words, uncertainty is simply what an unfinished thing feels like from the inside.

Which is why almost nobody wants to be told the date of their own deathTime HorizonsWhy dying is often hard, but sometimes easyRead the essay↗ (Gigerenzer & Garcia-Retamero, 2017). In their 2017 paper, "Cassandra's Regret: The Psychology of Not Wanting to Know," they call it "deliberate ignorance", the willful choice to avoid information of personal relevance. We will queue around the block for the small, manufactured mystery of a film and turn down, flatly, the one real mystery hanging over all of it.

What you choose not to know

Each ring narrows the set of questions about your own life. A plus marks an answer you have, a minus one you lack. The blue tokens are the answers you could get but would rather not have. That refusal is deliberate ignorance. After Gigerenzer and Garcia-Retamero (2017).

Staying longer

Going back to the walk to her door. The dog, the slower pace, the half step closer, the few seconds before her door when it could still go either way. That gap is not the wait before the good part. It is the good part.

Maybe stay there a second longer than you need to in this feeling of wonder, awe and ... curiosity.