UNCERTAINTY

*The Crazy Journal | October 2026*

The universe has never signed an agreement promising that your efforts will be rewarded, your plans will succeed, or your suffering will make sense. Yet you wake up every morning behaving as though such an agreement exists.

There is a dangerous assumption buried deep inside the human mind:

Study hard, and you should succeed.

Work hard, and you should become wealthy.

Love sincerely, and you should be loved in return.

Make intelligent decisions, and you should avoid painful outcomes.

Follow the rules, and you should win.

It sounds reasonable.

Unfortunately, reality does not operate under that arrangement.

People make intelligent decisions and experience devastating failures. Others make foolish decisions and become extraordinarily successful.

Healthy people develop terminal illnesses. Careless people live into their nineties. Brilliant businesses collapse. Mediocre businesses become billion-dollar empires.

Good people suffer. Terrible people prosper.

There is no universal system ensuring that everyone receives outcomes proportional to their intelligence, morality, discipline, or effort.

The world contains patterns, but those patterns are not promises.

And perhaps one of the most psychologically expensive mistakes a human being can make is confusing probability with certainty.

Read that again.

Not because you secretly did something wrong.

Not because you failed to believe strongly enough.

Not because the universe is preparing something better.

Sometimes, you simply lose.

And there may be no satisfying explanation.

Human beings dislike uncertainty for an obvious reason: uncertainty makes it difficult to predict threats.

Our brains are prediction machines. We constantly anticipate what might happen next.

Will this business succeed?

Will I lose my money?

Will this person betray me?

Will I regret this decision?

What if I had acted differently?

Prediction is useful. It helps us prepare, avoid danger, and make plans.

But somewhere along the line, prediction becomes obsession.

We start believing that if we analyse something long enough, worry about it deeply enough, or prepare for every possibility, we can eliminate uncertainty.

We cannot.

There is always missing information.

There are always variables we do not understand.

There are always consequences we cannot anticipate.

Even worse, we often do not know what we do not know.

You may spend six months researching a business, carefully examining the market, calculating costs, and preparing your strategy.

Then a government policy changes.

Or a major competitor enters the market.

Or your business partner becomes seriously ill.

Or customers behave differently from what your research predicted.

Your preparation wasn't necessarily useless.

It simply wasn't omnipotent.

This distinction matters because people who confuse preparation with guaranteed success often interpret unexpected failure as evidence of personal inadequacy.

They don't merely lose money.

They lose trust in themselves.

There is a special kind of suffering that arrives after something goes wrong.

It is called regret.

And regret has a favourite sentence:

After the business fails, the warning signs look obvious.

After the investment crashes, the risky decision seems ridiculous.

After the relationship collapses, every suspicious conversation suddenly makes sense.

The past becomes astonishingly clear once the future has revealed itself.

But this clarity is frequently an illusion.

Psychologists call it *hindsight bias*: the tendency to regard events as more predictable after they have occurred.

You look backwards with information that was not fully available when the decision was made.

Then you prosecute your former self for failing to possess the knowledge your present self now has.

What an unfair trial.

Imagine taking an examination today and being punished tomorrow because you failed to answer questions using information that would only be published next week.

Absurd.

Yet people subject themselves to this psychological punishment constantly.

Of course, sometimes you genuinely ignored warning signs.

Sometimes you were reckless.

Sometimes you violated your own principles.

That deserves examination.

But there is a difference between accepting responsibility and conducting a lifelong campaign of self-punishment.

Only one of those questions creates progress.

This is where uncertainty becomes uncomfortable.

You may desperately need something to work.

You may have invested years of effort.

You may have sacrificed sleep, relationships, savings, and opportunities.

You may have built your entire identity around the expected result.

None of that guarantees success.

Reality does not calculate how much emotional energy you have invested before determining what happens.

The market does not know that the money you lost was supposed to pay your rent.

A business does not become profitable because you sacrificed your weekends.

Another person is not obligated to love you because you loved them sincerely.

An employer does not owe you a promotion because you worked harder than everyone else.

Your desire matters to you.

It may motivate your actions.

But desire itself does not control external events.

This is painful because human beings have a tendency to confuse emotional investment with entitlement to an outcome.

We think:

*After everything I have done, surely this must work.*

No.

It might work.

It might not.

And the amount of suffering you have already endured does not automatically increase the probability of success.

That is one of the harshest truths of adulthood.

Human beings do not experience gains and losses symmetrically.

For many people, losing ₦100,000 hurts more than gaining ₦100,000 feels good.

This asymmetry is associated with *loss aversion*, a central idea in behavioural economics.

The implications extend far beyond money.

We struggle to accept lost relationships.

Lost years.

Lost opportunities.

Lost reputations.

Lost versions of ourselves.

And because accepting a loss is painful, we begin negotiating with reality.

We tell ourselves:

*I can still recover everything.*

*I only need one more opportunity.*

*I cannot stop here.*

*I have already invested too much.*

Sometimes recovering is possible.

Sometimes persistence is exactly what a situation requires.

But sometimes the desperate attempt to reverse a loss becomes more destructive than the original loss.

A person loses money and risks the remainder trying to recover it.

Someone spends five years in a failing relationship and stays another five because leaving would mean admitting the first five cannot be recovered.

A business owner continues financing an unviable project because shutting it down would make the original investment feel wasted.

This is the trap of sunk costs: allowing what has already been spent to govern decisions about what should happen next.

But the past is not a creditor you must keep paying.

The same applies to time, relationships, and opportunities.

Sometimes the most intelligent decision is to stop.

Not because you are weak.

Not because you lack ambition.

But because the future should not be sacrificed to defend the past.

There is something almost comical about human confidence.

We struggle to predict what will happen next month, yet routinely make decisions as though we understand what our lives will look like in ten years.

We forecast markets.

We predict elections.

We anticipate technological changes.

We estimate business performance.

We make detailed life plans.

Some predictions are informed and useful. Others are little more than confidence dressed as expertise.

The problem is not forecasting.

The problem is forgetting that a forecast is conditional.

It depends on assumptions.

And assumptions can fail.

One unexpected event can reorganise an entire future.

Consider how many personal and organisational plans were overturned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The lesson should not be that planning is pointless.

It should be that planning must include the possibility that the plan will become obsolete.

A fragile person builds a future that requires everything to happen as expected.

A more resilient person builds a life with room for error.

Financial reserves.

Transferable skills.

Relationships beyond professional transactions.

Multiple ways of earning.

The ability to change direction.

The willingness to admit being wrong.

These are not guarantees either.

They are ways of reducing the damage when uncertainty becomes reality.

Perhaps the most important distinction in this entire discussion is this:

Someone can make a terrible decision and experience a wonderful outcome.

Someone else can make an excellent decision and experience a terrible outcome.

A reckless driver may arrive safely.

A careful driver may be involved in an accident caused by someone else.

Neither outcome, by itself, proves which driving behaviour was sensible.

Yet we constantly judge ourselves by results rather than processes.

We call ourselves intelligent when things go well.

We call ourselves foolish when things go badly.

This is lazy thinking.

A better question is:

*Given what I reasonably knew at the time, was my decision defensible?*

Did I examine the risks?

Did I consider alternatives?

Did I act on evidence rather than impulse?

Did I protect myself from catastrophic consequences?

Did I respect the limits I had established?

If the answer is yes, a disappointing outcome is not necessarily evidence that your decision-making was defective.

If the answer is no, a profitable outcome does not magically make your behaviour responsible.

This is especially relevant to risk-taking.

And success can sometimes be a terrible teacher because it rewards behaviour that should never be repeated.

There is another side to this discussion.

The future is uncertain not only because terrible things can happen.

It is uncertain because wonderful things can happen too.

A business that appears unlikely to succeed can unexpectedly discover an enormous market.

A person who feels trapped in their circumstances can encounter an opportunity that changes everything.

A failed project can reveal a skill or connection that becomes valuable years later.

Nobody can guarantee these outcomes.

That is precisely the point.

If the future were perfectly predictable, possibility itself would become severely constrained.

There would be little room for surprise.

No unexpected discoveries.

No unforeseen opportunities.

No dramatic changes of fortune.

Uncertainty creates danger, but it also leaves the future open.

This does not mean every setback secretly contains a blessing.

Some losses are simply losses.

Some tragedies do not produce wisdom.

Some suffering changes people for the worse.

We should be careful not to romanticise pain.

But we should also remember that not knowing what happens next is not exclusively a threat.

Emotional maturity is not the absence of fear.

It is not waking up every morning feeling confident.

It is not being permanently calm, optimistic, or unaffected by disappointment.

It is the ability to experience uncomfortable emotions without automatically allowing those emotions to determine your behaviour.

You can be afraid and still think carefully.

You can be angry and choose not to retaliate.

You can experience a loss and decide not to chase it.

You can feel uncertain and refuse to make a desperate decision merely to relieve the discomfort.

This is difficult because the brain often prefers immediate emotional relief over long-term consequences.

When uncertainty becomes unbearable, action can feel like a solution even when it changes nothing.

Checking something repeatedly.

Seeking endless reassurance.

Reopening a decision.

Taking unnecessary risks.

Making another plan.

Trying to regain control.

The action reduces discomfort temporarily, which makes the behaviour tempting to repeat.

But relief is not the same as resolution.

Sometimes nothing needs to be done immediately.

Sometimes the wisest response is to tolerate the unanswered question.

And not every problem can be solved at the speed your anxiety demands.

The statement that the world owes you nothing can easily become an excuse for cynicism.

That would be a mistake.

The absence of guaranteed outcomes does not make effort meaningless.

It makes intelligent effort more important.

You cannot guarantee that your health will remain perfect, but exercise and preventive care still matter.

You cannot guarantee professional success, but competence and consistency still improve your opportunities.

You cannot guarantee a relationship will last, but honesty, respect, and commitment still matter.

You cannot guarantee financial security, but prudent financial behaviour still changes your exposure to risk.

There is an enormous difference between saying that outcomes are uncertain and claiming that outcomes are entirely random.

They are not.

Your actions influence probabilities.

Your habits shape exposure.

Your decisions compound.

Your environment matters.

Luck matters too.

So does timing.

So do circumstances beyond your control.

A serious understanding of life requires holding these truths simultaneously.

Pretending otherwise creates arrogance when you succeed and unnecessary self-hatred when you fail.

The challenge is to remain responsible without becoming delusional about your power.

At some point, you must accept that you will never have complete information.

You will make decisions without knowing every consequence.

You will occasionally trust the wrong people.

You will miss opportunities you didn't recognise.

You will spend money on things that don't work.

You will discover that some of your strongest convictions were mistaken.

You will look back on certain moments and wish you had behaved differently.

This does not mean your life has gone off course. It simply means you are a participant in an incomplete, evolving reality.

The demand for certainty is ultimately a demand to live without risk. But a life stripped of risk is also stripped of surprise, agency, and discovery.

You do not need a guarantee from the universe to take the next step.

You only need the courage to act with incomplete knowledge, the humility to adjust when reality speaks, and the wisdom to know the difference between what you control and what you must endure.

Make peace with the unfinished story.

And then begin the next chapter anyway.