Picture your hand holding a pill revealing, with certainty, what your life will look like in five years. Would you take it? It may sound like a gift or at least a temptation. We tactically spend our Penn years acquiring safety net upon safety net: take the easy class (but seven course units per semester), join the “right” organization (but dozens just in case), recruit for the safe jobs (but sooner rather than later). We never taste the pleasures of risk. When we do, we act like the financiers we are and downsize. In other words, we desperately crave definitiveness. What if instead, the gift lies in obscurity? What if there was value in uncertainty?
Pre-med friends, I know we are designed to tackle uncertainty (thank you, frontal lobe), and evolution, and blah blah blah. Yet frankly, I am sick of hearing first years and seniors grumble because “everyone knows what they are doing with their lives, but I have no idea.” Raise your hand if you have a friend who says that, and if not, you might very well be that friend.
Let me be explicit: Who exactly put the perverse thought in your head that you must know what your future holds? I want to apologize on their behalf. Do not get me wrong: Structure, coherence, and planning all matter. Being strategic and responsible is preferable to random incautiousness that may ruin your future. But who said that resolution is a requirement for a meaningful life? Why do we resist uncertainty and fail to accept an inevitable fact of life: the unknown?
Our friends in the humanities are on to something when they talk about the beauty of aporias, “those interstitial encounters arising out of puzzlement … temporal elements in which people exist in a state of befuddlement.” On the other hand, more grounded psychologists like Meg Jay dedicate entire careers to studying the uncertainty that “twentysomethings” feel. Plot twist: It is normal!
Yet we seem to fail to realize that, as college students, we have the best luxury in the world: time. Time to read, consume, intellectualize, and to figure “it” out — all of which will be gone in the day of nine-to-fives and mortgages. Ask anyone who graduated recently. They know that the safety net tactic does not save you from the ditch once you graduate. So, what should you do exactly?
The right question is not, “What should I do with my life?” but the harder one: “How should I live my life?” Even worse: “What do I truly like? What activities do I love and find so motivating that they capture me at the depth of my being?” Knowledge is plentiful, but motivation is scarce. Penn is information-rich but meaning-poor. Spend your Penn years exploring these questions — not how I dictated them, but in your own way.
Stop this pragmatic craving for so much definitiveness, concreteness, and conclusion in order to keep the existential anxiety about “what to do with your life” carefully suppressed underneath consciousness. I hate being the one to break it to you, but I truly must: This sense of safety to which you are holding on so tightly simply does not exist. Chasing certainty is painfully frustrating and utterly useless. The first realization for a meaningful life is precisely that we are never certain. Never. We are, well, just … alive.
I recognize that you cannot eradicate your desire for certainty. This human need is a plant whose roots are deeply ingrained in the ground and cannot be ripped out. But you are the gardener of your life and, in fact, have agency to stop watering it. Stoics like Epictetus believed that unhappiness comes from an error of classification of what we can control. I can control my thoughts and impulses, but I cannot control my future. If I fool myself into thinking I can control my future, I will be miserable.
As for my insignificant life, I apply a principle known in neuroscience as survival of the busiest. Essentially, we become what we hear, see, and do every day and do not become what we do not hear, see, and do. By being intentional in the present, I avoid worrying about the future. My emotions are my compass. They guide me by assigning value to things and telling me what is worth wanting. Writing energizes me; finance drains me. Unsurprisingly, I do more and more of writing and less and less of finance.
So I beg you, stop trying to find what your life and future should be about and start wondering about how you should live now instead. We have everything we may need to be happy, and yet it is still not enough. We want more. We play God and demand the impossible: to know the future. I looked around and realized the only certainty is uncertainty. So I thought, why not start from there?
Your “not knowing” is not an abject aberration. Your future as a college student is inevitably wobbly, inscrutable even. But that’s exactly the value of uncertainty: It is scary. The desire to eliminate uncertainty eliminates life. What happens when you halt this unbridled, pathological need for resolution is that you start to see that uncertainty is indeed invigorating — and dare I say it … liberating.
The French figured it out before us: “Lâcher prise!” Literally, let your hands go. If you let go of holding on so tightly to the sense of certainty, not only will the muscles in your hands immediately relax, but you will also be able to use your hands for things that actually matter. And you will see — trust me — you will see that this obscurity you are experiencing is not a constraint. It is a gift.
FRANCESCO SALAMONE is a Wharton junior studying decision processes from Palermo, Italy. His email address is frasala@wharton.upenn.edu.
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