What Do You Keep the Same?

In the year her mother was dying, Meghna left a salaried post to open her own practice and moved to a city where she knew four people. Her friends said she was fearless.

What they did not see was the rest of her week. She ate the same breakfast every day. She rang her sister at nine each night. She walked the same loop round the lake, and on Sundays she made her grandmother’s rasam.

“I am not fearless,” she told one of them. “I am organised.”

The people who love uncertainty

Nathan and Susannah Furr spent years interviewing inventors and founders. Many of them said that they loved the unknown and could not live without it. The Furrs, in The Upside of Uncertainty, report what they found when they asked a few more questions.

The same people had gone to surprising lengths to make the rest of their lives predictable. One always took the same seat on the plane, stayed at the same hotel and ate the same granola. One had married the person he fell for at school.

The Furrs call these things uncertainty balancers. Their list is short: habits, routines, rituals, objects, humour and relationships.

Why a ritual is not superstition

They cite the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who studied the Trobriand Islanders a century ago. When the islanders fished in waters they knew, they put a good catch down to skill. When they fished in unfamiliar waters, they performed rituals first.

The authors add a modern figure. In recent studies, up to seventy per cent of students carried out some small ritual before an important examination. Their conclusion is that ritual does a real job. It helps people carry the anxiety of an outcome they cannot control.

Building a world that is easier to predict

The philosopher Andy Clark reaches a related idea from the science of the brain. In Surfing Uncertainty he points out that humans do not only predict their surroundings. They rearrange them. His plainest example is the white line painted along the edge of a cliff road, which turns a frightening problem into an easy one. He calls this “building a better world to predict in”.

He reads social customs in the same way. He passes on one scholar’s description of them as devices for reducing the uncertainty people have about each other.

The next thought is my own gloss, though I think it follows. A mind that has to work out breakfast, the route and the evening call from scratch has less to spare for a dying mother and a new business. Meghna’s sameness was what her courage ran on.

Two kinds of sameness

The Furrs sort balancers into two groups. Some are small traditions that give comfort and something to look forward to. Their own family has pancakes for Sunday lunch, and marks milestones by walking across a bridge together.

Others are choices made once, so that they need not be made daily. Here they cite the psychologist Barry Schwartz, who has argued that too many choices leave people less satisfied and sometimes unable to choose at all.

The steadiest thing

Of everything on their list, the Furrs think relationships may be the most powerful. One executive told them that he had a stable core, and meant a marriage of thirty years. It let him do, as he put it, all the other crazy stuff.

The same man mentioned that his wife had stayed at home with the children. The book passes over that remark. I do not think we should. One person’s steadiness is very often another person’s work, and the nine o’clock call has someone at the other end.

Not a cage

They end with a caution. None of this is meant to be rigid. If a balancer stops working, change it or let it go. They also ask a sharp question about habits that only look like comfort. Am I using entertainment to avoid facing what is uncertain?

A balancer earns its place by letting you face the unknown. One that helps you hide from it is something different.