Exploring Humanity’s Relationship to Uncertainty with Elizabeth Weingarten

I had a great chat with journalist, behavioral scientist, and author of How to Fall in Love with Questions about the importance of harnessing a curiosity mindset.

Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon

I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Weingarten. She has such a great energy. Elizabeth is a journalist and applied behavioral scientist who works at the intersection of science and storytelling.

What do you do when faced with a big, important question that keeps you up at night? Many people seek quick answers dispensed by “experts,” influencers, and gurus. But these one-size-fits-all solutions often fail to satisfy, and can even cause more pain. Inspired by the poet Rilke and backed by modern science, her new book How to Fall in Love with Questions offers a fresh approach for dealing with the uncertainty in our lives.

I was honored to do a Q & A with her.

SBK: The urge to question can come up in so many different areas of our lives. Since you turned your attention to this in your book How to Fall in Love with Questions, what are the kinds of questions or situations that you see coming up again and again for you and others?

EW: Questions are, indeed, everywhere. One important clarification to start: The questions the book focuses on are the Big Life Questions—queries about topics like love, identity, meaning, purpose, mortality, loss. They are questions that don’t have fast, easy answers. Across the stories I tell in the book, there was one common situation that came up again and again. These questions often arise during moments of transition. This could be the transition from working to retirement, from college to the workforce, from being single to married (or married to divorced), from health to illness, becoming a parent, or losing someone you love. 

These are the times in our lives when uncertainty can feel the most intolerable. I know that was the case for me. I was inspired to write the book during a time in my life when I was holding questions about whether to stay in my marriage and what to do with my life after I left my job and the failure of a creative project in which I’d invested a lot of energy. This was when I discovered the 20th century poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and his advice to a younger poet, Franz Kappus, from 1903: To “love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” At that time, I’d never felt further away from loving the heavy questions of my life, and wondered how I might start. The book is my own journey to explore that, drawing from the wisdom of science, philosophy, history, art, religious scholarship and poetry.

SBK: What makes people so uncomfortable with uncertainty and those BIG questions in life? Generalizing of course, but what would you say is humanity’s relationship to uncertainty and questions today?

EW: As humans, we are wired to want to reduce uncertainty in our environments. That’s because, according to selfish brain theory, at any moment we’re trying to use as little energy as possible, and navigating uncertainty forces us to use more metabolic energy. While this was a smart adaptation for when food was scarce, this instinct doesn’t always serve us today. 

Of course, not everyone feels the same level of discomfort with uncertainty, and people feel different levels of comfort or discomfort across contexts and situations. There are many variables that can influence this. One is that individuals vary in their “need for cognitive closure,” a concept coined by the psychologist Arie Kruglanski in the early 1990s. He, along with other researchers, created a scale to help people measure their desire for answers and ease in the unknown. Your need for closure is influenced by many factors, including personality and experiences of trauma. 

It has always been challenging for us to tolerate uncertainty. But we may be living in a uniquely challenging time to do it. Research from Psychology Professor Nick Carleton at the University of Regina in Canada has found that as smartphone and internet penetration has increased, so has our intolerance of uncertainty. Of course, this is a correlation and doesn't necessarily indicate causation. However, Carleton suggests that having answers at our fingertips all the time means we are regularly missing out on opportunities to practice sitting with uncertainty. And, like a muscle, this can atrophy our capacity for it. Another factor is that we have more access than ever before to information about just how uncertain the world is, which can be overwhelming in and of itself. 

SBK: Let’s talk about tolerance for uncertainty. What benefits are there to building up this tolerance, and what can we do to work on this? Building up our tolerance for uncertainty is so important. Intolerance of uncertainty can make us more vulnerable to anxiety and related disorders, and a big part of managing anxiety is learning to tolerate uncertainty. 

EW: So how do we do that? One way is to cultivate patience. Far from being passive or weak, patience is an essential ingredient not only to achieving goals but to living well and actively during periods of uncertainty. Research suggests that becoming more patient helps people stay emotionally regulated as they navigate uncertainty. In one study, researchers, including Baylor University Professor Sarah Schnitker, tracked participants who reported 10 goals and their achievement across time. Students rated how much patience they thought each goal required and how much they had to achieve it. They also surveyed “informants” about the patience levels of participants to offset the self-report bias. Indeed, patience was key to exerting sustained effort in achieving goals. Schnitker’s work has also found that higher levels of patience are correlated with decreased depression and negative feelings, and lower incidences of health problems. 

As Schnitker told me, patience is about "waiting well while we suffer," bearing reality without giving up. To build this tolerance, it helps to reflect on what patience means to you, what's driving your desire to change, what that positive change would look like, and how it connects to your bigger goals. It's also essential to connect with a community that has similar goals and to actively practice patience in everyday situations.  

SBK: What’s the most surprising thing you learned throughout your research for the book?

EW: For a long time, I’d imagined that the best analogy for loving and staying committed to a question was our love for others—like my challenging relationship with my husband. But I learned that instead my relationship to my questions was a reflection not of my marriage, but my relationship to myself. That was at the root of being able to exist in uncertainty with more ease and patience. To love the questions, I’d first need to learn how to show myself more compassion. 

SBK: Maybe this is cheating, but I’d love to hear how you’d answer the central question of your book: how do you fall in love with questions?

The answer to this is going to be different for everyone. But, I can share what I found from my research and reporting that seem to be the four most important elements for people who are able to change their relationship to the questions in their life, and to the uncertainty they experience. They’re the four Cs—curiosity, conversation, community and commitment. 

Like anything you want to change, it first helps to practice. In the book, I provide a map and prompts to help anyone develop their own questions practice. You can think of this like a yoga or meditation practice. It’s unique to each person, but comes with a set of strategies you can use to help you bring awareness to the questions you’re currently living. 

Any questions practice is grounded in a mindset of curiosity. In this case, that means relating to the uncertainty in your life with more curiosity than fear—which is hard to do, especially when it comes to some of our most painful questions. I explore a variety of ways for how to do this in the book. The second C is conversation. With the right techniques, we can use conversation to help us create a sense of safety and security, allowing us to sustain curiosity rather than spiral into fear.

Community evolved to help us feel safe and secure, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s a key feature of being able to love the questions. But not all communities are created equal; I found some have special features that enable us to stay longer in uncertainty.

Finally, we need  to commit to the process of exploring our questions while observing which ones are no longer worthy of our attention. By connecting us with community and creating more structure around uncertainty, rituals offer one research-backed way to help us identify when to hold on to our questions and when to let them go. 

SBK: Here, here! All the best with the book launch, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Weingarten is an author, journalist, and applied behavioral scientist who works at the intersection of science and storytelling. How to Fall in Love with Questions is available everywhere books are sold. She is also the author of the Substack Time Travel for Beginners.