The two truths we live within.

What do you want to be?
Who are you going to become?
What do you stand for?

These are asked of us as if there is a final answer. As if you’re supposed to know, early and forever. And even if no one says it directly, you learn: knowing is praised, not knowing is quietly suspicious.

And we’re left to believe that once we answer these questions, they’ll go away for good.

They don’t.

Workplaces, cultures, and systems all carry the same expectation:

Have a plan.
Have a path.
Have a five-year vision.
Know your lane and stay in it.

The strange thing is, none of this actually matches the nature of life.

Life, in its truest form, is uncertain. It is ever-changing, evergreen. Seasons shift. Industries transform. People move, love, leave, begin again. The external world is built on constant movement.

Some modern thinkers have said that in our age, change has quietly become our only permanence, and uncertainty our only real certainty. Philosophers and psychologists have circled this for a long time: that the human condition isn’t “once-and-for-all clarity,” but learning to live inside an unfolding story.

Meanwhile, inside your skull, something very different is happening.

Your brain craves certainty.
It loves pattern recognition and prediction. It wants to be able to say, “I’ve seen this before, I know how this goes, I know what to expect.” That’s not a character flaw. It’s survival. A brain that can predict is a brain that can protect.

Existential writers have described this as the basic tension of being human: we stand in a world that offers no guarantees, while our inner life aches for order, meaning, and a clear script. The unsettling feeling we call “anxiety” is often just that collision—our awareness of how many paths exist, and how few promises come with any of them.

So you end up living at the intersection of two truths:

• A world that is fundamentally uncertain.

• A nervous system that is wired to want guarantees.

Most of us never get the language or the self-awareness to name that conflict. We just feel the tension and assume something is wrong with us.

We call it anxiety, confusion, being “behind.”
We tell ourselves we should be more decisive, more defined, more sure.

But what if the issue isn’t that you don’t know?
What if the issue is that you were never shown how to have a relationship with not knowing?

Some philosophers of learning have argued that real growth actually begins in those “problematic” situations—those unresolved, in-between moments when life stops fitting into your old categories. Uncertainty isn’t an error in the system; it’s the doorway into a deeper kind of understanding.

If you look back at many of the humans whose stories we keep telling, uncertainty shows up as a main character in their lives, too.

Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t born with a neat title like “genius Renaissance artist.” He moved through roles: apprentice, engineer, anatomist, designer, painter, problem-solver for other people’s impossible questions. His life looks less like a straight career and more like a series of curiosities he let himself follow.

Mark Twain didn’t begin as a famous author with a clear literary destiny. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, a riverboat pilot, a miner, a journalist, a failed investor, and a speculator. He kept changing directions as his life and the world shifted, and the voice we now recognize as “Mark Twain” was shaped inside all of that uncertainty.

Marie Curie crossed countries and barriers, working as a governess and teacher before she had access to formal scientific study. She stepped into research that had no guarantees, following questions about radiation that no one could promise would lead anywhere. Her path to two Nobel Prizes was paved with risk, doubt, and conditions that told her she didn’t belong.

Maya Angelou lived more than one life before she became known as the writer we quote today. She moved through jobs as a streetcar conductor, dancer, performer, coordinator, and journalist. Her writing didn’t emerge from a tidy, linear résumé. It emerged from a life that had been many things, in many places, through many seasons of uncertainty and reinvention.

None of these people woke up with a single, pre-labeled identity. They learned to live alongside ambiguity, to let “I don’t fully know yet” be part of the story instead of a disqualifier.

The very idea of a career as one fixed identity that you hold for an entire lifetime is, in many ways, a modern myth—a tidy story we tell to soothe the brain’s need for predictability.

Here we are, treating uncertainty like a lump in our throats, something to swallow down and ignore. But the elephant in the room—the one we’re actually meant to befriend—is that uncertainty is the only constant that walks beside us our whole lives.

You were meant to be evolving. To be curious about who you are becoming. To let different parts of you come forward in different seasons.

The people we quietly admire across history, or even observe in our day-to-day, were not simply decisive. They were willing to stand in ambiguity long enough to find out what else they could be.

To live that way, you don’t have to stop wanting certainty. Your brain will always look for patterns and predictions. That’s its job.

But you can start to see uncertainty with different eyes.

Not as proof that you’re lost, late, or lacking.
But as a sign that you’re standing somewhere alive. Somewhere where multiple futures are still possible. Somewhere your life hasn’t collapsed into a single, rigid script. And be honest: is that really you—a human meant for a singular existence?

That’s why curiosity matters here.

Curiosity doesn’t erase the shakiness that comes with not knowing. It doesn’t magically calm a nervous system that wants everything labeled and guaranteed. What it can do is soften your stance toward uncertainty, just enough that you don’t turn against yourself inside it.

Instead of, “I should have this figured out by now,” it sounds more like:

“Of course this feels unsettling. I’m in a space my brain can’t fully map yet. Maybe that’s not a failure. Maybe that’s exactly where growth happens for me.”

You don’t have to celebrate uncertainty to begin. You don’t have to love it. You don’t have to pretend it feels cozy.

You can simply get a little more curious about it:

Why does this feel threatening to me?
Whose expectation of certainty am I carrying?
What might become possible if I didn’t treat this in-between as evidence that I’m wrong, but as proof that I’m still becoming?

If you’re feeling shaken by the uncertainty in your work or your life, nothing is wrong with you. You are just standing in the honest gap between a world that changes and a brain that wants to know.

My hope is that, slowly, you can start to see that gap not only as a place of fear, but as a place of possibility—a place where you are allowed to live a little more positively curious about what else your life, your work, and you could become from here.