“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards”. – Søren Kierkegaard
Everything in the Universe behaves as a particle and a wave at the same time. In 1927, German physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Werner Heisenberg made this clear by formalising what is now known as the “Uncertainty Principle”. In simple terms, this principle argues that you cannot precisely measure both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. The more accurately you know where something is, the less you know where it’s going, and vica-versa. This isn’t because we lack better instruments, it’s because the system itself refuses certainty. Reality, it turns out, is fundamentally flawed and uncooperative, so if we take this idea and apply it beyond quantum mechanics, it starts to feel uncomfortably familiar. The more we try to pin down the future, the less predictable it becomes.
This uncertainty isn’t abstract, it is lived, systemic and increasingly destabilising; climate change accelerates, natural disasters intensify, livelihoods disappear and geopolitical shocks create man-made famines, endless wars, and conflicts with no exit strategy, markets wobble and democracies strain. Every attempt to “stabilise” the system seems to generate new forms of chaos – welcome to the age of uncertainty. To add fuel to the fire, humans are (unsurprisingly) terrible at dealing with uncertainty, as our brains evolved to seek out causality and closure, a structured ending to a story, with obvious villains, heroes and solutions. Uncertainty registers as danger, so we respond in the most human way possible, by clinging desperately to anything that promises order. This is why we listen to strong leaders, simple answers and nostalgic visions of a past that was supposedly more stable (we can concur it wasn’t). Cue the rise of populism, polarisation and a flirtation with authoritarianism, because nothing soothes existential anxiety quite like someone saying “don’t worry, I’ve got this”. And so, in our desperation to escape uncertainty, we trade complexity for certainty, freedom for reassurance, and in doing so, risk constructing the very fragility we claim to fear.
There are very real, scientific, and valid reasons humans do not sit well with unpredictability or uncertainty, as it acts as a profound stressor on the human brain, which interprets the unknown as a threat, activating the amygdala to trigger fight-or-flight while suppressing the prefrontal cortex. This weakens decision-making and emotional regulation, forcing the brain into hypervigilance and driving anxiety, exhaustion, and a tendency to construct worst-case scenarios. The brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, is designed to treat ambiguity as potential danger, releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Put simply, ambiguity doesn’t invite reflection; it triggers a neurological overreaction in which the brain mistakes “not knowing” for “imminent catastrophe” and behaves accordingly. Yet, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle didn’t tell us to stop measuring, it revealed that uncertainty is not a temporary problem awaiting a solution, but a fundamental property of reality itself.
Scaling the argument down from planetary chaos to interpersonal behaviour; demonstrating how, on a more psychological level, this obsession with reducing uncertainty shows up even in everyday life. Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT), argues that when we meet someone new, we instinctively start collecting data: What do you do? Where are you from? What are your interests? This isn’t just about curiosity or efficiency, it’s about anxiety management, a psychological reflex triggered by discomfort, or a way to reassert control in ambiguous situations. We use it unknowingly in many day-to-day situations to try and manage risk, making even banal social interactions reproduce the same logic as global systems trying to manage risk. We try to reduce uncertainty in order to create the illusion of predictability, because, “If I know enough about you, I can predict you”; however, this is a false truth because ultimately people remain contradictory. Therefore, in attempting to map one another into something coherent and predictable, we forget that human beings are not equations to be solved, but energies of context, emotion and change. This brings me onto my next point: context matters more than traits. We convince ourselves that if we understand someone’s personality, whether it be their temperament, values or habits, we can anticipate how they’ll behave. However, this ignores the fact that people are not static entities, meaning we are context-dependent and hence, the same person who is patient and measured in one situation can be impulsive and reactive in another. For instance, your colleague who seems reliable might falter under pressure, and the friend who appears aloof might be fiercely loyal when it matters. We mistake traits for blueprints, when in reality they’re just rough sketches that collapse the moment circumstances shift. Lastly, it’s argued that behaviour isn’t linear. Even if we could perfectly record someone’s past actions, individual human behaviour doesn’t always follow a predictable trajectory; people change their minds, act irrationally, and even surprise themselves. A decision made today might contradict everything they’ve said or done before, not because they’re inconsistent, but because they’re alive and responding to new information, emotions, pressures.
On the other hand, there’s a counterargument worth considering. History does repeat itself, and human psychology rarely strays far from established patterns. While individual behaviour might appear non-linear in isolated moments, when we look at the bigger picture, we see the same cycles playing out again and again, both at the civilizational level and in personal relationships. People don’t reinvent themselves as dramatically as we like to believe; they replay variations of the same script. The person who has betrayed trust before will likely do so again under similar circumstances. The leader who craved power in one context will crave it in another. Freud wasn’t entirely wrong when he suggested we’re governed by repetition compulsions, patterns which are formed early. This could explain why we unconsciously recreate them throughout our lives. We think we’re evolving, adapting and surprising ourselves, but often we’re just performing the same behaviour in slightly different costumes. Entire societies follow this logic too: empires rise and fall along nearly identical arcs, financial bubbles inflate and burst with predictable regularity, political movements cycle through the same phases of idealism, radicalisation, and disillusionment. Perhaps the illusion isn’t predictability, but rather our belief in our own capacity for genuine novelty.
Just as we cannot simultaneously know a particle’s position and momentum with precision, we cannot attempt to control complex systems, whether quantum, climatic, political or interpersonal, without generating new forms of unpredictability. The crisis of our time, then, is not uncertainty itself, but our refusal to accept it. We continue searching for certainty in systems that can no longer provide it, in politics, markets, climate, relationships, even democracy, clinging to strong leaders, simple answers and rigid frameworks that promise control but deliver only the illusion of stability. So, perhaps the answer lies not in trying to predict everything, but in strengthening our capacity to respond well when we cannot, choosing to act ethically and collectively even when outcomes aren’t guaranteed, designing institutions and relationships that can bend without breaking, and accepting that uncertainty is not a flaw in reality, but a condition of living within it. We can’t eliminate uncertainty, we should try to stop allowing the fear of it to dictate who we become.
Dolphinmind 