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My family was driving to Vermont to ski for a few days now that the kid was out of school for winter break. It was one of those hazy shade of winter days as the sun struggled to break through its own ennui to care barely enough to shed some light with only grudging warmth. While plowed, the roads were still slippery, decorated with the brilliantly white remnants of a furious snowstorm that passed the region less than 24 hours ago, with tree branches laboring under a late-term pregnancy of frozen snow. In short, this wasn't northern Virginia where we drove up from or even New York City where I grew up. This was a strange land.
Then I missed the exit that Google Maps told me to take. I blame the cop who was hiding in a speed trap right before the exit and distracted me. "Wasn't that the exit?" My wife waved her hands as we drove by. I winced inwardly but said casually, "No worries, we will take the next one. We only lose five minutes. No sweat."
So, we did take the next one and quickly embarked on an unintended journey through Alice's winter wonderland through the back roads of upstate New York and eastern Vermont. While the roads were treacherous enough, with nary a house visible for miles, the scariest part of the experience was seeing the dwindling signal bars on my wife's and my cell phones. And we were on two different networks! Both of them were failing us.
Even worse, my 11-year-old boy, who had never known a world without ubiquitous connectivity and his iPad, became positively panicky when he realized that we had no connectivity and wasn't able to track our movements through unfamiliar roads. Also, while I pretended to be fine and relaxed, I was also not exactly happy that I had to trust blindly that the back roads would lead us back to civilization sooner or later. There was definitely anxiety.
It was a withdrawal ― from the addiction to certainty. We had been so addicted to the constant certainty that these maps provide us that we felt anxious by those few moments of instant knowledge. And we weren't even lost. Stepping back, I started to think that all the technologies and tools that we have built since the beginning of time are just our attempts to increase certainty and order in our lives as we faced the vast unknown of our environment.
The holiday season actually gives us a prime example of this. As many have pointed out, Christmas is an amalgam of different legends and rituals that were reshaped into the celebration of the birth of Jesus. Santa Claus is even more mysterious, its mythmaking crisscrossing Turkey to Siberia to deliver us today's jolly old white man carrying a sack full of toys delivered on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeers.
What are these myths but our attempts to inject some sense making into the world to impose a level of order and certainty that we can understand. This is important. We need to explain the world at a level that we can understand based on our intellectual capacity and experiences.
That's why the Greek gods engage in jealousies and fights. It rains or not based on how the gods are feeling. Provide the gods with a sacrifice, even a life, to appease their anger. Throw someone into the ocean to guarantee a safe fishing trip. Believe in the one god to go to a wonderful place in the afterlife. What are these myths but our attempts to explain the world and bring certainty in our lives? No wonder we need these myths and religions. We can't bear uncertainty. In fact, we would come up with the most preposterous stories to explain why our lives are the way they are.
Certainty is the foundational addiction that forces us to engage in torturous sense making to impose order onto this world and our experiences in it. Maybe that's because we are social creatures. We need to depend on others in our community. To know that we can depend on you to be there to behave in ways that we understand is the certainty that we emotionally need to sustain us and keep us sane when faced with a hostile world.
This is also a major holiday week. Come to think of it, the calendar is also a sense-making tool to bring order in our lives. In any case, I wish everyone happy holidays. But sorry, I gotta go now. My daily calendar is telling me what I have to do 15 min from now. Certainty can be comforting but it can also be suffocating. I guess that's the nature of addictions. We both crave them and resent them at the same time.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
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