Simone Stolzoff has a gift for asking questions that slice the soul. In his first book, The Good Enough Job, he asks how work came to be so central to our identities, and what we can do to rebalance our lives. He’s a journalist whose writing on the intersection of work, identity, and relationships has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and National Geographic.
Now he’s back with a second book: How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers. This time around, he unpacks why uncertainty generates so much anxiety, and what we can do about it.
In a world where climate change is reshaping the actual landscape, politicians are throwing out new policies at the roll of a dice and then walking them back again, and AI is changing reality as we know it, Stolzoff offers answers. Not on what’s going to happen—but how to cope better.
Stolzoff sat down with Fast Company to discuss what he learned while writing his book.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Something that struck me about your book: Not knowing if something will happen is more painful for most people than a bad experience actually happening. Can you explain why uncertainty feels so painful, and walk us through the research?
Our natural tendency is to see it as a threat: If you think about an ancestor of ours in the jungle hearing rustling in the bushes, not knowing the source of that noise could potentially be lethal. Our brains are wired to feel safe and secure when we are certain, and to feel anxious or worried when we are uncertain.
One of our brain’s natural tendencies is to try and get out of uncertainty as quickly as possible. The problem is often this means opting for the safe bet, which isn’t always the right bet.
[Studies have found that] for women facing a potential breast cancer diagnosis, the period of time between when you get a biopsy to when you get the results tends to be the hardest part of the entire journey—more stressful than chemo or surgery.
Another really interesting study found that research participants who were given a 50% chance of receiving a painful electric shock felt far more stressed than those who were given a 100% chance of receiving a painful electric shock. We would rather deal with a certain bad thing than have to reckon with the ambiguity of not knowing our fate.
What problems does this intolerance create?
It leads to anxiety. It leads to worse mental health. It leads to people worrying about things they can’t control. At a broader scale, I think one of the main skills of life is to be able to get to a place where you don’t know what is to come, and to persist nonetheless.
I wonder if our need for answers makes us more vulnerable to misinformation.
It does, and research has shown this. If you’re intolerant of uncertainty, the attractiveness of false certainty is all that much more alluring. If someone offers an easy explanation for how you should cure COVID, for example, it’s really easy to latch on to an easy answer.
That’s comforting until you realize that it’s false. And in the first chapter of the book, I talk about a woman who falls into a cultlike organization where someone promises if you just do X, Y, and Z, then you’ll get this desired outcome. And it’s attractive. Who wouldn’t want a clear set of instructions or protocol of how to succeed or go to heaven? But as she told me, it was easy until it wasn’t.
What factors in our society lead us to be worse at handling uncertainty?
There’s a study that I love from a researcher named Nicholas Carlton at the University of Regina. He found that the rise of the internet, and specifically of mobile phones, correlates with the rise of intolerance of uncertainty.
I think a few things are going on. One is that we live in this information age. You might expect access to limitless information helps resolve some of the uncertainty we feel. But in fact, often more information just fuels our anxiety.
This access to information robs us of practicing sitting with what we don’t know. Maybe 10 years ago, I might have been okay not knowing the name of an actor, for example. Now I feel this almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket and figure it out right now. The problem is that not all questions are Google-able or ChatGPT-able.
Our tolerance for uncertainty is particularly low right now. And our ability to tolerate uncertainty is what makes so many people feel anxious and unmoored.
What should we do if we’re dealing with uncertainty—for example, waiting for the results of a test, or for news that may be good or bad?
The first place to start is [to ask yourself if] there’s anything you can do to influence the outcome. Say you are a high school senior and you are really stressed out about whether or not you’ll get into college. If you’re in the period of time before you submit the applications, there are things that you can do to help influence the outcome: You can try and write a great application, you can get good grades, you can get letters of recommendation, etc. Those are all sort of in the sphere of your control.
Then if you’ve done everything that you can do to influence the outcome, or if you can’t influence the outcome, the next level down is: Are there ways you can prepare for different contingencies, different possible outcomes?
Often, especially in a business context, we get stuck on one particular outcome. But it’s more adaptive for us to be able to plan for multiple potential scenarios so that we’re better equipped to deal with what might come our way.
Once you’ve done what you can to prepare for multiple different scenarios, it comes down to acceptance. You can do things like look for silver linings. You can do this practice called bracing for the worst, which is thinking about the worst thing that could happen and then trying to figure out how you’d be able to bounce back from that.
But really it comes down to regulating your nervous system—being able to be okay with the not knowing. That may mean distracting yourself. There’s a wonderful study where they had people waiting for the results of a test play three different levels of Tetris: One was really easy, one was really hard, and one was just right.
The researchers found that the people playing the really easy and the really hard levels were really stressed out by the waiting game. However, the people who found something that sufficiently challenged them were able to find a flow state and the waiting passed more easily.
There’s also been research that shows breath work and yoga and meditation can help in dealing with the waiting period.
What about a situation where you don’t know when the uncertainty will be resolved?
There’s an example that I give in the last chapter of the book, which is I have this friend named Emily, who’s a therapist. She works with entrepreneurs and people dealing with change and different facets of their lives. But before she became a therapist, her mom was given a terminal diagnosis. Emily spent weeks sitting by her mom’s side and worrying about the worst-case scenario.
A family friend came by and asked, “How are you doing?” And she said, “I’m not doing great. I’m riding this roller coaster of fear and respiratory grief, and I’m really not sure what I’ll do if my mom dies.”
Her friend told her, “The version of you that will be born into existence if and when that tragic event occurs will have more context, more information, and be better equipped to deal with that tragedy than you are today. You have to trust in your future self to handle your future problems.”