Fear of the unknown and our addiction to certainty
And the illusion of progress that keeps us stuck
During COVID, I found myself doing something I didn’t recognise at first. I was consuming news obsessively, going down conspiratorial rabbit holes, clinging to any narrative that made me feel like I knew what was happening. In a time of radical uncertainty, I was desperately constructing certainty—even if it was illusion.
Then I started noticing other people doing the same thing. Different narratives, different rabbit holes, different sources—but the same desperate clinging. Everyone was reaching for something, anything, that would make the chaos feel manageable.
And that’s when it hit me: we were all doing it. In the face of genuine uncertainty, we were each building our own illusions of certainty. Not because the information was necessarily true or helpful, but because not knowing felt unbearable.
That recognition turned back on me like a mirror. Hang on. I’m doing this too.
It sparked an existential crisis that would reshape everything I understood about how we navigate life.
The Universal Existential Exam
COVID was an existential exam we all had to sit simultaneously. And the exam question was simple: Who are you when everything external stops?
I knew myself through my friends, the places I went, the work I did, the role I held. My identity was anchored externally—in routines, relationships, environments, activities. And suddenly, all of it stopped. The cinemas, the bars, the gym, the office, the social gatherings. Gone.
What remained?
For many of us, the answer was uncomfortable. We discovered that our sense of self had been built almost entirely on external reference points. When those disappeared, we didn’t know who we were anymore.
The healthy place to live is in the centre of our lives—the space between our inner and outer worlds, in balance. But most of us haven’t been living there. We’ve been living weighted towards the outer world—our identity, our security, our sense of self built from external certainties. Some people live too far in their inner world, to the detriment of the outer. But the majority of us have organised ourselves around the external, and that imbalance leaves us vulnerable when those externalities shift or disappear.
Some people passed that exam. They used the pause to reconnect with something deeper, to find their centre. Others didn’t—they white-knuckled their way through, desperately trying to maintain old patterns in a world that had fundamentally shifted, or they collapsed entirely.
I’d already had hints of this from earlier crises—the implosion of a key relationship, being made redundant from management consulting. Those events had started to crack open my external anchoring. But COVID took it to a fundamental level. The structures paused. And in that pause, I saw something I couldn’t unsee.
We’ve been living weighted towards the outer world when the healthy place is the centre of our lives—balanced between inner and outer. We’ve built our identities, our security, our sense of self from external certainties. And when those certainties disappear—or when we realise they were never actually certain—we face a terrifying question: What’s real?
The Addiction to Certainty
We cling to certainty because it gives us the illusion of control. If we can predict what happens next, we feel safe. If we can manage outcomes, we feel powerful. If we can understand what’s happening, we feel oriented.
But here’s the truth: certainty is largely illusion.
Life is uncertain. It’s built on flow, cycles, emergence, unpredictability. Living organisms—which is what we are—exist in constant uncertainty. That’s natural. That’s how life actually works. But we’ve been organised around something else entirely: the idea that we can control, predict, and manage our way to safety.
And we’ve built enormous structures to support this illusion. Risk management. Insurance industries. Quality assurance systems. Economic frameworks designed to create predictability. These aren’t just helpful tools—they’ve become entire industries, massive structures we’ve erected because we cannot handle what might occur in the present moment.
But here’s what happens: when we respond to uncertainty by trying to maintain the status quo, we close ourselves off. Not just from genuine growth, but from evolution itself. We try to keep everything the same, to hold our position, to prevent change. But life doesn’t work that way. The universe, nature, everything else—it keeps moving. It keeps evolving. And when we try to stay dead still whilst everything around us continues to move, the gap between us and reality grows.
That’s when things get crunchy. That’s when the separation becomes unbearable. That’s when crisis arrives—not because life is attacking us, but because we’ve been fighting against its natural movement for so long that the tension finally breaks.
The irony is profound: we’ve created anxiety-fuelled control systems to manage uncertainty, and those very systems generate more anxiety because they’re fighting against the fundamental nature of life itself.
We become addicted to certainty. We convince ourselves that by managing risks and controlling outcomes, we’re protecting ourselves from failure, discomfort, or harm. But in reality, we close off the space for genuine growth—the growth that requires stepping into the unknown with trust rather than control.
The Illusion of Progress: How We Maintain Certainty Whilst Pretending to Change
Here’s where it gets insidious.
We know, somewhere deep down, that clinging to certainty keeps us stuck. We feel the stagnation. We sense that real growth requires change, and change requires stepping into the unknown.
But stepping into genuine uncertainty is terrifying. So we do something clever: we create the illusion of progress.
We make surface-level changes that look like movement but don’t actually threaten our sense of control. A new job that’s fundamentally the same role. A new relationship that replicates old patterns. A new routine that maintains the same underlying structure. We rearrange the furniture whilst staying in the same house.
We focus on external markers—achievements, promotions, new experiences—and convince ourselves these represent genuine transformation. We chase visible change because it feels like we’re doing something, like we’re progressing. But true progress is internal, often invisible to the outside world, and it requires facing what we’ve been avoiding.
Real growth means challenging core beliefs, confronting uncomfortable truths, and making radical shifts in how we organise our lives. That’s uncertain. That’s uncontrollable. That feels dangerous.
So we stay busy. We optimise. We implement systems. We pursue goals. We maintain the appearance of movement whilst actually remaining in the same patterns, the same cycle, the same fundamental relationship with life.
This is how we trick ourselves: we maintain certainty (by not actually changing anything fundamental) whilst appearing to embrace uncertainty (by making visible changes). We get to feel like we’re growing without having to face the genuine unknown.
And we can do this for years. Decades, even. Moving laterally, creating the illusion of upward momentum, all whilst staying firmly in our comfort zone.
Until something breaks. Until crisis forces us to confront what we’ve been avoiding. Until the structures we’ve built can no longer contain what’s actually happening.
What We’re Actually Avoiding
When we cling to certainty and create illusions of progress, what are we really avoiding?
We’re avoiding the recognition that our identity—the person we think we are—is not who we actually are.
Our identity is constructed. It’s built from beliefs (many inherited, most unexamined), emotions, thinking patterns, roles, and external reference points. It’s a mixture of what we’ve absorbed, what we’ve performed, what we’ve been told we should be. And more often than not, it’s weighted heavily towards the external rather than the internal.
We live in the space between our inner and outer worlds. That centre point—that’s where your life actually exists. And that centre connects you to something deeper: your core nature.
Your core nature isn’t your identity. It’s what existed before the identity formed. When your dad’s sperm met your mum’s egg and there was that spark—that spark is you. That spark is your life. That spark is your core nature. It exists in flows and cycles, naturally. It’s the living organism beneath all the constructed identity.
Your identity is transient. It’s built on beliefs that shift and change. We all have a haircut from our teens we’re embarrassed about now, but at the time we believed it was perfect. That’s the transient nature of beliefs. If I asked you to list the top 20 beliefs you navigate life by, could you tell me which one will be knocked off its perch next because you’ll discover it doesn’t work? You don’t know.
But your core nature—that’s the indestructible part. That’s the source of your intuition and knowing. That’s what remains when everything external falls away. And the centre of your life—that balance point between inner and outer—that’s where you actually exist.
And here’s what terrifies us: connecting to that core nature, finding that centre, requires letting go of the certainty we’ve built around our identity. It requires admitting that who we think we are might not be who we actually are. It requires stepping into the unknown of discovering what’s beneath all the patterns, all the performance, all the control.
That’s the genuine uncertainty we’re avoiding. Not the uncertainty of external events, but the uncertainty of encountering ourselves.
Living Organisms in a World Demanding Control
We are living organisms. We exist naturally in uncertainty, in flow, in cycles of growth and decay and renewal. That’s how life actually works—emerging, unfolding, adapting, responding.
But we’ve been organised around something entirely different. We’ve been conditioned to believe that life should be predictable, controllable, manageable. That uncertainty is a problem to be solved rather than a natural condition to be lived within.
This is the fundamental misalignment. We’re trying to impose mechanical control on organic life. We’re treating ourselves as machines that can be optimised and managed, rather than living systems that need to flow and adapt.
And when we resist life’s natural uncertainty—when we try to force certainty where none exists—we generate anxiety. Not the helpful, acute anxiety that signals danger, but the chronic, pervasive anxiety of fighting against reality itself.
We’ve built entire cultures around this fight. Economic systems that demand predictable growth. Work environments that require certainty of outcomes. Educational systems that prioritise measurable results over genuine learning. Social structures that reward control and punish vulnerability.
All of it is attempting to create certainty in a fundamentally uncertain world. And all of it generates the anxiety it claims to protect us from.
What Makes Embracing Uncertainty Possible
So how do we stop? How do we step out of this addiction to certainty and the illusion of progress it creates?
Not through willpower. Not by simply deciding to “embrace uncertainty” or “let go of control.” That’s just another form of trying to control the uncontrollable.
It happens through reconnection with your core nature—that indestructible part of yourself that exists beneath all the identity, all the patterns, all the constructed certainty.
When you connect to your core nature, you begin to recognise something profound: you have a place in the web of life. You have purpose here. Nature doesn’t make mistakes. And that spark of life that is you—it exists before, during, and after whatever circumstances you’re facing.
This is what I call existential strength. Not the strength to control outcomes, but the strength to exist through change. The recognition that stuff will come and stuff will go, change will happen, and you don’t know how it will unfold. It will emerge in front of you, unpredictably, uncontrollably. But you will exist. Before, during, and afterwards.
This isn’t a belief you adopt. It’s more than a recognition you make. It’s a connection to the deepest part of you—your core nature. And then it’s slowly listening to that and moving with it. Creating space to start to see what happens if you live from the inside out.
You create small spaces. You start with small things. And that builds momentum. After some period of time, you start to move from the inside out with more ease, grace, and purpose. You begin to find that centre of your life—the balance between inner and outer—and live from there rather than weighted entirely towards the external.
For me, that framework has been Realm Theory—learning to understand myself as a living organism with core nature, seeing the patterns I’d absorbed and replicated, distinguishing between the constructed identity and what sits beneath. It gave me tools to reconnect, to listen, to create those small spaces where I could begin living from the inside out.
But the specifics matter less than the principle: you need something that helps you see what you couldn’t see before. Something that shows you the illusion of progress for what it is. Something that helps you reconnect with your actual nature as a living being in an uncertain world. And then the patience to start small, to build momentum, to slowly find your way to the centre of your life.
The Choice Before Us
We can keep clinging to certainty. Keep building illusions of progress. Keep pretending that if we just manage things better, control more effectively, achieve the next milestone, we’ll finally feel secure.
Or we can recognise that certainty was always illusion. That the control we’ve been seeking is fighting against life itself. That the unknown isn’t something to be feared but the very space where life actually happens.
This isn’t about recklessness or abandoning all structure. It’s about distinguishing between helpful frameworks that support life’s natural flow and rigid control systems that fight against it. It’s about recognising when we’re genuinely growing and when we’re just rearranging the deck chairs.
It’s about asking: Am I trying to control my way to safety? Or am I learning to exist with strength through whatever emerges?
COVID gave us all a glimpse of what happens when certainty collapses. Some of us are still recovering from that existential exam. Others are still pretending it didn’t happen, rebuilding the same structures, clinging to the same certainties.
But once you’ve seen that your identity is externally anchored, that your certainty is largely illusion, that you’ve been creating false progress to avoid genuine change—you can’t unsee it.
The question is: are you ready to stop clinging? Are you ready to see the illusion of progress for what it is? Are you ready to discover what exists beneath all the control, all the performance, all the constructed certainty?
Your core nature has been waiting all along. That indestructible spark. The part of you that will exist before, during, and after whatever uncertainty you’re facing.
The unknown isn’t the enemy. The addiction to certainty is.
Want to explore the hidden influences in your life? Download my short 30-minute ebook: Cultural Psychology, Patterns and The Hidden Architecture of Your Life.
Want to explore the hidden influences in your life - download my short 30min ebook Cultural Psychology, Patterns and The Hidden Architecture of Your Life.