The Problem with Certainty

‍Most people want certainty. We want certainty before we start therapy, certainty before we leave a relationship, and certainty before we take a risk that might change the direction of our lives. Think about a time when you tried something genuinely difficult. A moment when the stakes felt incredibly high. Maybe you were making a major career pivot into a completely new industry, or you were considering a move across the country to a city where you don't know a single soul. If you're like most people, what you wanted more than anything was a guarantee. An ironclad promise that all of the discomfort, vulnerability, and effort would pay off. You wanted certainty before you took the risk. In many ways, this is understandable. Human beings are prediction machines. We are constantly trying to determine what will happen next, whether we are safe, and whether the energy we invest today will produce the outcome we want tomorrow.

The problem is that life rarely offers that level of predictability. Plans change. Circumstances shift. Opportunities appear unexpectedly and disappear just as quickly. Sometimes we do everything "right" and still end up disappointed. Other times, things work out despite our mistakes. Often, outcomes are influenced by countless variables that sit far beyond our awareness or control. Yet much of modern culture continues to sell certainty. We are surrounded by promises: the guaranteed solution, the foolproof strategy, the perfect roadmap, or the formula that claims to transform relationships, careers, happiness, productivity, confidence, or mental health. The message is usually the same: follow these steps, and everything will work out. But life does not operate on guarantees.

The philosophy behind This Might Work begins with a simple observation: Uncertaintyis not the same thing as hopelessness. At first glance, those ideas can feel inseparable. If something is uncertain, we might assume there is little reason to try. We often treat certainty as the prerequisite for hope. But hope does not requirecertainty. Sometimes it begins with the willingness to believe that the future does not have to look exactly like the present.

For many people, the alternative is cynicism. You cannot be let down if you never expected anything to begin with. If you assume the outcome will be bad, you never have to risk being wrong. It can sound practical and protective, but it does not merely protect us from disappointment. It also prevents engagement. Being thoughtful about risk is very different from waiting for guarantees. When we decide in advance that nothing will work, we stop experimenting, we stop participating, and we stop giving possibility a chance.

The demand for certainty is often what keeps us stuck. And the problem is that waiting for guarantees can mean waiting forever. Accepting hope without promises removes the barrier to entry. It is not lowering the bar for success. It is lowering the threshold for action.

Think about an area of your life right now where you have been completely paralyzed. Maybe it's a project that matters deeply to you, a creative pursuit, or even just trying to build a new habit. Have you been holding out for the instruction manual that promises 100% success before you take the very first step? Because that manual doesn't exist. So, what if, instead of waiting for absolute certainty, you gave yourself permission to abandon the guarantee? What if you took one small, imperfect step forward?

Life as an Experiment

‍Think about planting a garden. You put the seeds in the soil, you water them, you make sure they get sunlight, but you cannot actually guarantee a tomato will grow. A late frost could hit, or bugs could eat it. Yet you plant the seed anyway. You do not need certainty to move forward. You only need enough openness to consider that something different might be possible. That shift changes the role of hope entirely. Hope is no longer a guarantee. It becomes the reason we continue participating in life despite uncertainty. Meaningful change begins when we decide to take action anyway.

A scientist does not run an experiment because the outcome is already known. If the answer were guaranteed, there would be no need for the experiment. The experiment exists because gathering data is the only way to move forward. And a failed experiment does not make the effort meaningless. Every experiment leaves uswith information we did not have before.

But when things don't work out the way we hoped, many of us stop treating the outcome as information and start treating it as a verdict. That is where we can become trapped between two extremes. On one side, we have the hyper-individualistic hustle culture telling you that you are 100% in control of your destiny. Any setback becomes proof that you somehow got it wrong. If something failed, you made the wrong choice. This perspective often leads to burnout and immense shame when things go wrong. At the opposite end, we have a kind of modern doomerism that tells you that because the world is unfair and systemic problems exist, personal effort is basically pointless. Neither perspective tells the whole story. Both contain a grain of truth, and both become harmful when taken too far. The same outcome can become evidence for very different stories, depending on how we choose to interpret it.

Agency, Accountability, and the Weather

‍We have agency. The choices we make, the habits we build, the conversations we have, and the ways we respond to challenges all matter. At the same time, we do not exist in a vacuum. We inherit circumstances we did not choose and constantly navigate environments we did not design. Our lives are shaped by family systems, access to resources, broader economic realities, and, frankly, by sudden life events that sit entirely outside our control. It can be tempting to believe that people generally get the outcomes they deserve and deserve the outcomes they get. We call this the just-world fallacy. But some roads are smoother than others, and some people begin much closer to their destination.

Life is a lot more like driving a car. You control the steering wheel and the brakes. You decide when to turn and when to stop. That is your agency. And it's important to keep your hands on the wheel. But you do not control traffic. You do not get to choose the condition of the road. And you definitely didn't summon the sudden storm that just rolled in.

How Change Actually Happens

‍Once we understand this balance between accountability and compassion, the next question is how meaningful change actually happens. The answer is usually less exciting than people would like.

We live in a culture that absolutely loves a life hack. The 30-days-to-a-completely-new-you industry is booming. The illusion of efficiency is intoxicating. We are drawn toward anything that promises faster results with less effort. But meaningful psychological change rarely, if ever, comes from a shortcut. Our brains simply do not rewire themselves overnight.

We are so conditioned to want the cinematic 80s movie montage. The hero sweats a little while a rock anthem plays in the background. The calendar pages blur by, and suddenly their life is completely optimized and perfect. The credits roll. The problem is that this mentality is psychologically destructive because it creates unrealistic expectations. The unglamorous reality of how human beings actually change rarely resembles the version we see in movies. It looks like setting a boundary with a family member. It’s choosing to have one five-minute difficult conversation instead of avoiding it for another week. It's a new perspective. It’s a moment of unfiltered honesty with yourself. It's simply the decision to try again after failing yesterday.

These moments are easy to overlook because they rarely feel significant while they are happening. There is no soundtrack. Nobody is clapping for you. No moment when everything suddenly clicks into place. Yet these moments are often where change actually happens. Lasting change grows through reflection, experimentation, and small decisions repeated over time. You are trading the fantasy of the overnight gimmick for the reality of compound interest.

Change starts small. It can be slow. Sometimes frustrating. Often imperfect. If you have been working on healing from trauma or trying to change a deeply ingrained behavioural pattern and it feels like it is taking forever, you are not doing it wrong. Slow progress does not necessarily mean you are failing. It may simply mean you are doing the work.

On Pain and Perseverance

‍Of course, accepting slow progress is one thing. Continuing when things become difficult is another. Following a breakup, a job loss, or a major disappointment, people are often expected to reassure themselves that something better is just around the corner. The pressure to immediately find a silver lining and convert pain into a positive life lesson is exhausting. When people are hurting, they are already carrying the weight of the situation itself. Now they must manage the hardship and perform optimism. Toxic positivity is dangerous because it demands that we invalidate what is true. Your internal reality is screaming that you are in pain while your external presentation insists everything is a blessing. Psychologically, this comes at a cost. The more we try to suppress difficulty rather than acknowledge it, the more energy that performance requires. Eventually, pretending becomes its own burden and keeps us from seeing what our pain is trying to show us.

Continuing Anyway

‍To endure the slow process of real change, you need perseverance. Perseverance not as an unbreakable machine-like forward momentum, but as the willingness to remain engaged. You don't have to show up with a good attitude. You don't even have to execute your plans perfectly. Sometimes perseverance is just taking the nextstep anyway, even when you're discouraged, overwhelmed, or completely exhausted while you take it.

Perseveranceis not ignoring that pain. It is not convincing yourself that every single setback has some magical purpose designed by the universe to make you stronger. Some experiences are genuinely difficult, and some losses contain no hidden lesson. Because sometimes a flat tire is just a flat tire. It's just a piece of metal on the road that ruined your afternoon. And sometimes a loss is just a profound loss, and it deserves to be grieved, not life-hacked. You cannot optimize your way out of human suffering. Sometimes the most meaningful response to adversity is not pushing harder, but allowing yourself to pause.

We often equate resting with quitting. But you are allowed to take the car off the road. Sometimes progress means taking a break. Other times it means staying curious, being patient with your own lack of energy, and holding on to the hope that change remains possible, even on a day where absolutely everything went wrong. You hope, because hope is the prerequisite for taking the next step. You tend the garden despite the unpredictable weather forecast. You take the first step before you can see where the map ends.

What if we stopped thinking about failure altogether? What if the thing you have been avoiding was not a pass-or-fail test of your worth, but simply an experiment? What if the goal was not guaranteed success, but the collection of new information about yourself and your environment? Every attempt becomes valuable. The guarantee you wanted at the beginning was never available. But data always is.

Life is unpredictable. Setbacks are inevitable. There are no guarantees. Yet despite the lack of certainty, people continue to adapt. They heal, they build things, and they surprise themselves constantly.

This Might Work is a reminder that possibility still exists, even when a guarantee does not. At its core is the belief that your efforts matter, that uncertainty does not eliminate hope, and that meaningful change is often built through small acts of courage repeated over time. And perhaps most importantly, the belief that sometimes the most honest, hopeful thing we can say about the future is not "this will work." It is:

‍This Might Work.