Is unpredictability becoming a comfort zone?

 

Life is unpredictable.  Yet we try to search-out security.  And when it doesn’t happen, we acknowledge the unpredictability, which provides a weird sort of comfort.  It’s as though an unpredictable space is a natural comfort zone.

If we look at the world around us from whatever perspective dominates our thinking, we face uncertainty.  Economic instability, climate crisis, war-torn communities, unacceptable gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ - in every desperate scenario the dominant underlying cause is human behaviour.  But the behaviour includes an inability to  clear up the mess we have created and develop a predictable and sustainable norm.  Is the inability a consequence of the limitations of our thought processes, which we might recognise but fail to acknowledge?  But rather than admit failure, we sometimes create a model to explain to ourselves, and others, the complexities of a difficult scenario.

In the system thinking world, a causal loop diagram (CLD) is a widely used tool.  A CLD visualises how different variables in a system are causally related.  They are certainly helpful when trying to understand complex or complicated problems (there is difference) but the two-dimensional, static nature of most CLDs can, at best, only provide a snapshot of a multi-dimensional, dynamic system.  All that being said, the CLDs can provide a comfort zone when faced with unpredictability.

In the world of football, every game is unpredictable.  Pundits can wax lyrical on stats, but stats are backward looking and the future is rarely an extrapolation of the past.  But if experts can’t talk about past form, what else is there to discuss?  And if the results were truly predictable, it would take away the excitement of the games.  There are those who think thy can influence the results; players who touch the turf or say a prayer on their way onto the pitch.  I know one ardent fan who always uses the same urinal before home games - the comfort break and comfort zone both in one place!

The paradox is that the comfort zone of unpredictability is, for many, not very comfortable because there is always the thought of an eventual negative outcome.  We tend to worry about what might go wrong rather than be excited by what might go right.  Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don’t want.  If we think of the unpredictable state being analogous to an airport departure lounge but with more unknowns, we know where we want to go but accept there are uncertainties.  In the ‘real life’ departure lounge, our flight could be postponed, cancelled or, in the worst case, experience a mid-flight fault.  But the stats tell us it is highly probable it will leave on time and arrive at the planned destination, on schedule.  In our ‘imaginary’ departure lounge, we tend to anticipate our destination will not be where we want to be and will leave us in an undesirable state.  So, for example, the football fan’s team will loose a crucial match and face relegation; rather than hammering the opposition and continuing their journey to the top of the league.

So throughout life, we hop in and out of ‘departure lounges’, as a temporary respite from what we believe will be undesirable outcomes.  Maybe we should be more positive in our thinking and focus on the potential opportunities, rather than the problems - it’s a pity I don’t practice what I preach!