Interlude: the fatigue of certainties

Some people have an answer for everything. They navigate the world with an always-updated internal GPS, turning left or right without hesitation. I envy them sometimes, the same way I envy those who can fall asleep instantly—it must be comforting to live without the constant hum of doubt.

A certain kind of fatigue comes from certainties. It’s different from physical tiredness or even mental exhaustion. It’s the fatigue of carrying armor that no longer fits but we’re afraid to remove. Each certainty is a piece of metal that protects but also weighs, that defends but also limits movement.

I observe it especially in meetings where everyone knows exactly what should be done, except nothing changes; in conversations among friends where everyone has opinions whose value, foundation, and legitimacy are unshakeable, for themselves, at least. The same certainties produce the same results. Certainty has become a sophisticated form of paralysis, a perpetual motion that goes nowhere.

There can be comfort in doubt, I’ve discovered. Not the paralyzing doubt of someone who can’t choose a dish at a restaurant, but the generative doubt of recognizing that every answer is provisional. It’s like walking barefoot: more vulnerable, yes, but also more capable of feeling the terrain, of adjusting one’s step as the texture changes.

Organizations hate this. The world seems increasingly to dislike this. We want visionary leaders with clear answers, defined strategies, illuminated paths. But the people who serve as my references are collectors of uncertainties; people who knew how to say “I don’t know” without it sounding like defeat or disinterest; who understood that navigating fog requires different skills than following highways.

The paradox is that absolute certainty and complete ignorance produce similar behaviors. Both eliminate the need to think. The person who knows everything and the one who knows nothing arrive at the same destination: the inability to learn. It’s in the intermediate territory, in that twilight between knowing and not knowing, that true intelligence operates.

I’ve learned to distrust my own convictions, to treat them as working hypotheses instead of eternal truths. It’s tiring, I admit. It would be easier to choose a side, an ideology, a ready-to-wear belief system. But I prefer this fatigue to the dead weight of fossilized or plasticized certainties; or the comfort and illusive protection of belonging to some modern peeudo-tribe. At least this fatigue is alive, it moves, it transforms.