These are just some thoughts I had recently on the subject of having to deal with uncertainty in individual lives. They are off the top of my head and not cross-checked against any scientific literature.

Uncertainty exists in almost every aspect of life. It is anything that cannot be quantified at the instant of time that it is required.

Quantifying something doesn’t necessarily imply a numerical value, rather an objective confirmation of existence, or even a Boolean confirmation of truth value.

This directly implies that every decision we make or need to make contains uncertain variables. In many cases, it is sufficient to know the range of uncertainty in order to proceed with a decision. But in certain aspects of life, it becomes crucial to either quantify uncertainty or eliminate the variable altogether.

It is a hopeless case to keep adding variables to a problem or to a set of related problems, when it is known in advance that the variable cannot be quantified. Eliminating even a single variable either by quantifying it or removing it from a set of problems can lead to remarkable gains in the ability of a mind to solve the problems at hand.

An individual deals with uncertainty in several aspects of their life:

1. Social uncertainty
2. Economic uncertainty
3. Self uncertainty
4. Problem solving uncertainty

Social uncertainty This involves the relationships of the individual to other people both directly and indirectly involved in their life. Human beings are creatures with underdeveloped primate brains which have to co-exist with modern technology. The same emotional impulses that governed our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago, when conditions were different, drive the individual’s activities throughout their life. At a social level, the modes of interaction, such as language, behavior, body language, institutional or community membership may have evolved in their form, but not in function. Everyone has similar aspirations, emotional states and thought processes. Individuals differ in their ability to understand both their own capabilities and responding to the social cues of others.

The culture adopted by a society dictates the manner of most social interactions. However, conflicts arise when individuals choose to deviate from cultural norms, but may be constrained by factors inhibiting their ability to do so.

Economic uncertainty This relates to the medium of exchange of material goods and services, generally known as money. This also relates to the individual’s understanding of how economic value is generated, transferred and in some cases conserved in a range of activities in which the individual may or may not be a direct participant.

Self uncertainty Most individuals are not deeply aware of their own self. They do not spend the time in acquiring knowledge about their thought process, or why they do certain things in a certain way while others may do the same things in a different way. A general disregard for independent thinking is prevalent in almost all demographics around the world. Individuals limit their thoughts by offloading responsibility of thinking to someone else. This leads to societies where the thoughts prevalent in that society can be propagated and manipulated at will by people who have an incentive to do so. Attempts are also made to systematically drain a populace of its independent thought either by censorship or by deliberate attempts to limit distribution or harm the reputation of the originator by using out of context and distorted narratives to crush the individual’s ability to survive within that society.

This leads most individuals to develop either an inferiority complex or a superiority complex. The inferiority complex keeps them trapped in single dimensional modes of thinking for the entirety of their lives. The superiority complex just enhances their ability to exercise certain authoritarian rules over the rest of the lot, while still being trapped in unidimensional ways of existence. An unconventional thinker, is either forced to pursue an existence devoid of all meaning or will be persecuted to insanity or death by the rest of society for fear of an upset in their own arrangements of existence. The economic or social standing of an individual bears no relation to these complexes or ways of thinking.

Problem solving uncertainty This relates to the finding of ways to solve concrete problems that are available to them at their current station in life. The standard schooling and college education systems prioritize this aspect above other aspects. Once in an employment or even in a self started initiative, the day to day goal of a workday becomes to solve certain problems in ways in which you are familiar with or to find, model and then solve a problem using familiar or novel methods. Most empirical STEM, scientific and business problems are part of this aspect.