Anonymous Wanderers

The quest for certainty is killing everything

There's a pervasive quest of certainty in our society.

It's not new.

Have you never heard the question "What job do you want to do?" when you were at school? I remember being 14 when the question kept popping up regularly in that serious way that was definitely different from the tone of amused expectation that is used when asking the same question to a 5 year old kid.

By the age of 15, hard choices were already made in my schooling, between the so-called scientific and literary branches. I didn't regret my choice, although I felt it was harsh to part with a few disciplines. Two years later, a few months before taking the baccalaureate exam, we were told to apply with the universities or high schools we wished to integrate. Many of us didn't even get their 3rd choice, many changed tack over the next few years. I did change tack 3 years later. I know people had built certainty about my future around that period. As it happens I failed them for my own good.

I spent those 3 years at uni. It started with finding out the hard way how badly Physics and Maths were taught by the lecturers of this famous university in the south of Paris. I fell out of love for both disciplines I enjoyed so much (and was really good at) before. As a side dish I had taken computer science to fill up my schedule. Most of the teaching was happening without a computer, for the computer was a central unit hosted in one of the university's buildings, and shared with the students through a series of keyboards and monochrome screens as workstations, and a single matrix printer near the door. The facilities were already antiquated for the time, but I literally fell in love again. I got so good at it that during the final comp. exam, I came up with two very different sets of algorithms, one for myself and one for a friend of mine who couldn't write a single line of code, and left the room before the next best completed the job for himself. The disturbance created by the uninspired teaching of everything in this uni was compensated by a newly found freedom to experiment within my allocated time share. At last, I could feel the fog of uncertainty lifting up a bit.

And that was a happy thing, because that got me to apply to what was the best comp. science school of the land. I got accepted, and got myself a hefty loan with no repayments for 4 years in order to jump over the 3 years study cycle and the year of compulsory military service. Interest rates were around 10%. If I had been uncertain, I wouldn't have done it, and I wouldn't have been able to face the challenges that came later (like moving on the other side of the world with a young family and no job on arrival).

Anyway, without thinking about the consequences and without having failure as a potential option anywhere in my brain or my guts, I signed up for the school and for the loan. I had no financial guarantees of any sort. I threw myself into it, not like one throws oneself in battle, but like one gently steps into a warm fragrant bathtub for one hour of soaking and relaxation: without any kind of fear about what could happen while soaking or after.

In the hindsight I think that this (for better words) lack of thought, frivolity, light-heartedness is salutary and absolutely required for total success.

At that point I was sure of what I wanted to do. Certainty was here and now: in my guts, and in every moment. There was no future, no fear. I was going with the wind, and that wind had my name on it.

And all went well. Indeed.

I loved my studies so much that I was learning on the spot and chewing the assignments effortlessly. And suddenly I had customers. That's right. As a student, I had customers – no sponsors or patrons, no friends of my parents (as you may I figured out by reading other posts, they didn't have any). I can't remember how it started. May be I was in a shop, waiting at the counter in order to ask a salesperson for some memory or a drive, and I started to talk with the person before or after me. And that was a real grown up. I mean, I was in my early 20s (and never looked older than my age) and that person had a business and was asking me questions, and I was answering as honestly as possible. We made an appointment, I visited the business, I listened to the man's problem, and I suggested a solution that pleased him. We shook hand, I delivered, I got paid, and that happened times again. People with small businesses were suddenly asking me to build applications for them, I was seating next to them a few hours at a time, and we were co-building their own tailor-made application, and it was put to use immediately. The bliss of the practical creator.

Then another student asked me if I would help him with an opportunity that had fallen onto his lap. Often we went around the clock, coding for a customer at night in order to deliver a new version of the app in the morning, in person, and for a couple of hours we trained the people on the new fonctions. I was also working on weekends. I just loved it. It was effortless. We became very good friends, and we are still very good friends to this day. I believe that the only thing we were sure of is, that we were always doing our very best. And that was enough.

Nothing was impossible. Everything was possible. Our lecturers understood what we were doing. We were allowed to deliver an assignment with a great deal of freedom, like that time where we had forgotten to hand-in an expert system for our AI class (1992)... and we got full marks for a fully functional inference system that used a database to store the premises, the rules, and the deductions found by the rules on each iteration. No tree, very few optimisations, but that was doing the job without a hitch. That is what engineering is about: delivering with and only with the available resources (usually time, hardware, money). Our delivery showed that the concepts taught in the lecture we didn't attend were understood and pushed to the next level. The form didn't matter as long as they could see the foundations were in place and robust.

Unfortunately the goals of many education systems are very different nowadays. Testing students for what foundations they have acquired is a much too complex endeavour for too many teachers. And it is much less productive than checking for form: filling in the blank with one of the two or three proposals has become the norm. Parents push for it because it fits what amount of time they have available at home in order to ensure their kids will pass the tests. And when the kids fail the tests, the teacher is blamed. No wonder why today's AI – this colossal shit recycler – is so popular. Is there a limit to the depth people will go in order to get certainty?

When I finished my military service, the job market was in a terrible state, even for IT engineers. Shitty 1994. Anyway, after a bit of a struggle I found a job with an IT services company, as a salesperson. I was not prepared for that, but I was still surfing on the "everything is possible" wave. Everyday I was cold-calling CIOs or their direct reports, making appointments, presenting the company, understanding their difficulties, responding to requests, writing up offers... There was more fear than doubt at the beginning, but it worked itself out beautifully. My results really pissed off some of my older – know it better – colleagues. Internal politics played against me. I was warned but couldn't give a hoot. I left and slammed the door on my way out. I hoped from jobs to jobs, noticing the ever growing incompetence of the management and colleagues as the Internet bubble was growing up. A few years later, I rejoined the company I had slammed the door, with the mission to develop a new kind of activity. A few months later we were kindly asked to bid for a job that was totally in my assignment. Unfortunately, that request was for a job that had never been done in Europe on such a scale, and we had never done anything of that ourselves while our competitors had some experience of it.
From a salesperson perspective, we had no chance to win. But we had to bid. So I dreamed up a service that no-one had seen before, I sold it to my employer, I laid out the plan of the offer, I convinced people around me, I moved a mountain by pulling every rope I knew in the company. Once again, I could feel negative carpet politics playing around me, and I still didn't give a hoot. It was like a hockey game, I was playing the puck where it was going to be while my detractors were playing me or my popup team. The team started with me alone. I got assigned a bunch of freshly out of school techs, and quickly I was able to tap in the best resources of the company. A double-edged sword indeed. At the end, the 600+ pages offer I had dreamed up was co-written by 30 people, and they all fell in line behind the 30 year old guy for one of the top beauty contests of our lives. And we won. Once again, everything was possible. Certainty was not part of the equation. It worked because there was enough trust around us to make the nay-sayers shut their bitching.

Everything is possible, even the worse.
When the worse came in the life of my young family, I also found a solution that stopped the worse and ended up providing us with a much better life. No school prepares for that. What do you do when life gives you lemons? Do you cry or do you make lemonade?

What is the one and only thing that each of us is sure about his/her own's life? It's death.
All humans die: the rich, the wealthy, the famous, the powerful... like all the laypeople: all died, all will die, and the yet to be born will die. The where, how, when, belong to the realm of uncertainty, as another gazillion of questions.

The vast majority of the people I have met (so far in more than 50 years of a life rather rich in contacts under several skies) spend a lot of time trying to find some hold on some of this gazillion of questions. Whether they are in their teens or their 80s, or in-between, I believe they all try to build some certainty about some aspect of their future – their after death, the future of their children, the future of their relationships (from romantic to professional), the weather, the next holidays, what they will buy on the next sales... you name it. There seems to be no limit to this unquenchable thirst to finding answers to questions regarding events that have not yet arisen, and may never come to be.

Quite often these are questions that are distractions from the real matter at hand: for this person to define how she will know she has found inner happiness.

On an A4 piece of paper, draw a 3 inches diameter circle. Within this circle write neatly "what concerns only me and is completely under my control". This is area #1.

2 inches further, draw another wider circle around (2). Within write: "what has an impact on me but I have little control on that". This is area #2.

Draw another circle another 2 inches apart from the previous one. This is area #3. Within write: "what has an impact on me and I have absolutely no hope of having any control on it".

And finally in the rest of the space defined by this last circle and the border of the page write: "what has no direct impact on me." This is area #4.

Now write down the topics of your thoughts in the area they belong to.

A few cues.

What have you put in area #1?
Activities may be? More meditation? More walks in nature, more yoga, more physical activity to boost your dopamine maybe? More social activities? More gardening?
Then we're not there yet.

Take another piece of paper and write down the expected results you will feel inside you as a result of these activities. Will you write things like Pride? Calm? Satisfaction? Peace of mind? The relief of not having these questions running in your head for an hour? If you wrote this last one, you're getting somewhere because you have found a way to make real quality time for yourself.\ The next step is to enter this state more often, and keep the silly questions out of your mind. And then new thoughts will surface while you are performing this (these?) activities: thoughts that are just about you, about your needs, about your own desires. At last. At last you have succeeded to make time for yourself and face the only questions that matter. These are the only questions that may lead to your happiness.

The fear of uncertainty is grounded in trying to fix the future.
Even most of those who have deep down in their rational minds and their guts accepted that nothing is permanent do try to fix the future of something from time to time. I failed on an epic scale every time I tried. And it did hurt. I've learned that I must take great care to not do that anymore.

Does that sound to you that what I have written is trying to fix the future? You have a point.
What I'll say for my defence: