Are You Overdosing on Certainty?
An examination of the dangers of certainty for people, families, and countries.
If you were sentenced to one year of prison, what would you do?
Most of us are creatures of habit who avoid all change and cling to the certainty of our daily routines, no matter how bad our lives are going.
Since the pandemic started, how many hours did you spend playing video games or viewing social media sites? I’m as guilty as anyone, rationalizing that watching every Netflix series from Turkish historical superhero sagas to Spanish telenovela period pieces to Weimar Germany detective thrillers broadens my storytelling perspectives.
We wasted our time because we were bored. Or scared. Because we wanted things to go back to normal. Or were unwilling to confront a new normal.
We never faced the possibility the pandemic would not only keep us caged for most of the year but allow us to see that the ways we’ve always done things may not be the best way.
One of the best articles of the year was “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting.” The author looked at how the shutdown improved traffic and air quality, proved the viability of working remotely, and showed we could survive without obsessive consumption.
He wrote how the Great Pause was “the greatest gift ever unwrapped.”
It took me nine months to realize I could have birthed a new skill, written a book, or gotten back into great shape if I accepted the uncertainty that life might not go back to normal.
These writers came to that realization after the first month.
One of the biggest obstacles to improving any aspect in our lives is the certainty with which we hold onto false perceptions.
With over 25 years experience as a professional tennis coach, I can analyze, identify and solve the problems in a student’s game in ten minutes.
But it can take weeks, even months, to break the death grip usually held by each student on the flawed belief system blocking their progress.
And some never succeed.
David Dunning is a Nobel-Prize winning psychologist who studied the phenomenon of how incompetent people perceive themselves and the performance. With his partner, grad student Justin Kruger, they published a paper documenting the Dunning-Kruger effect.
If you haven’t read it, this is a fantastic article that explains so much of what ails us as people and as a country.
Here’s a quick summary of their findings:
- Incompetent people often feel tremendous confidence that they mistake for knowledge.
- Competent people, on the other hand, underestimate their own skills, believing everyone else knows the same information.
- A person who has been successful in one area tends to believe they are competent in every area.
How many times have you dealt with some insufferable fool who tries to tell you about your area of expertise? (Check that, how many non-women have had to deal with this type of experience?)
The fake news era has forced most people to cling to certainty at a terrible cost.
Rather than be confused and search harder for answers, most people look only to the information sources which confirm their biases.
And the algorithms controlling social media make this behavior even worse, as they feed us search results based on our past reading patterns.
What happens when a person is unable to question their beliefs and the sources of the information they consume?
You get people like this:
(Just to be clear, he had to remove his mask, so he could yell/spit at people who refuse to believe the election was stolen.)
As much as I would still like to believe in the future of America, the Capitol Insurrection and the 65% of Republicans who believe the election was stolen provide approximately 48,000,000 data points that indicate we are close to another civil war at best and a fascist coup at worst.
But on an individual level, certainty, not curiosity might be the thing that kills most cats.
In mental health, the biggest obstacle to helping people is to overcome their certainty.
Think about how often people lie to themselves or to others to hide their past mistakes or character flaws. For many, the pain of acknowledging a problem is greater than the possible benefit of leading a better life. But that would imply the person recognizes the problem and chooses to avoid it.
From chronic depression to schizophrenia to toxic narcissism to sociopathy, the most common trait is that people view their thought processes to be perfectly rational.
According to Healthline.com, “It’s estimated that 16.2 million adults in the United States, or 6.7 percent of American adults, have had at least one major depressive episode in a given year.”
What happens in the next given year?
Will a different 6.7% of American adults have a major depressive episode?
According to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, depression co-occurs with other illnesses and medical conditions, including but not limited to: cancer, stokes, heart attacks, coronary artery disease, HIV, Parkinson’s Disease, eating disorders, substance abuse, diabetes, and polycystic ovary syndrome.
Eric Erickson’s stages of psychosocial development ends at Stage 8, Integrity vs. Despair, which begins at age 65 and ends at death. Despair can be summed up by the conflict felt as people are haunted by the question, “did I live a meaningful life?”
It sure sounds like the vast majority of people will suffer from a major depressive episode. Many people eventually come out of these episodes that relate to illness, broken relationships or the grief of losing a loved one.
But for the rest of us who suffer from depression, the world seems gray all the time.
Some people are not so fortunate.
I used to coach a tennis student, call him Doug, and he became a sort of younger brother. He was a former college athlete and still in incredible shape in his forties. He lived in one of the most expensive areas of Los Angeles near the ocean, had tons of friends, and was financially set.
When he lost his wife to cancer, he was racked with guilt. His life spiraled down internally, but it was hard to see that anything was wrong on the surface.
One day on the courts, Doug told me how he felt totally out of shape because he wasn’t exercising. He said his friends would ask him to play tennis or go to the gym and he’d say “no” because he was so depressed.
Then he said he felt abandoned as his friends stopped calling because he had said “no” every time.
Then he blamed them for abandoning him because they should have known to keep calling and somehow find a way to get him to go exercise.
For months, I begged him to go to grief counseling and get therapy, but he always found a reason not to follow through.
One day, I got a call from him when he was especially down. I drove an hour to get to his place near the ocean and spent the next eight hours trying to convince him to leave his tiny shack behind. The house was built in 1920, had no air conditioning, old lead paint everywhere, and windows that were impossible to open.
And every part of it tortured him with memories of his wife and their life together.
Doug could have sold that 1200 square foot tear down for over $1.2 million and bought a mini-mansion with a tennis court near me for 40% less money. Better still, our neighborhood was close to the best high school baseball program in L.A. (his son was already a Little League All-Star).
He couldn’t do it because he was paralyzed by the logical torture chamber he had built around his guilt, grief and depression, brick by insane brick. And he didn’t want me questioning his contortionist logic, so he never returned another one of my calls, texts, or emails.
About a year later, I got a call from a stranger who found my number in Doug’s contacts. My friend spent that year going through every possibility and future scenario. He made a video explaining how his now-motherless son would be better off as an orphan.
Then he put his mouth around a rifle at a deserted construction site, so his son wouldn’t find his body.
You may think you see your world with perfect insight, but beware of the Holmesian fallacy — it could be deadly.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, famously said “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
The problem with this logical fallacy is it requires omniscience.
No matter how hard we think about some unsolvable problem or crisis, we are not God. There may be some explanation or solution that we are unable to see.
My friend was convinced he had nothing to live for, even though 99% of the world would probably kill to be financially set for life, white, 6'4" and ripped.
His certainty about his perceptions made it impossible to help him because he didn’t show the outward signs of the insanity that might have forced him to get treatment.
No one knows what’s going on inside another person, no matter how much we love them. We all need to learn how to spot a person at risk, instead of skating through life unprepared and then saying it was shock when tragedy strikes.
I still feel angry, guilty and sad about my friend after six years.
When you are weighed down by serious problems or feel intense pain, that is the time to reach out, not to hide in shame or denial.
Here are some fantastic articles by people who survived severe depression, addiction, and thoughts of or actual attempts at suicide.
Sam Grittner is a person who came dangerously close to the edge. He wrote about how the successful aspects of his life did not make his self-hate magically disappear:
To my surprise, there are no magic hats in which to stuff rabbits of arrogance, jealously, or denial into another dimension where they disappear.
Deanna Zandt points out the problem for many people who suffer severe depression and have thoughts of suicide:
A common experience in my depressive episodes, until 5 years ago, was a disastrous cocktail of not knowing that what I was experiencing was abnormal (I thought I just couldn’t handle life like everyone else does) and extreme shame about that.
She also wrote that family and friends need to notice when something is off, that community care is on us, not the people needing the care.
…when you haven’t heard from someone in a while, or when you see them posting things that give you a red-flag-tingle. Does that feel awkward? Yep. Do you fear it sounds like you’re overreacting? Sure. But what’s the worst that can happen if you poke the person who’s hurting?
(In memory of my lost little brother)
