From a dear friend of mine:
Heisenberg. Does that name ring a bell? No, I’m not referring to AMC’s hit show, “Breaking Bad.” I’m referring to the pioneering 20th century German physicist Werner Heisenberg. You might recall from your mildly boring, daydream-filled high school physics class that this man’s claim to science fame was his “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,” which basically tells us that we are fundamentally limited on our ability to predict how quantum particles will behave on a subatomic level. Don’t worry though, I’m not here to discuss quantum mechanics. I’m more interested in the other part. The part that all of us experience, and that weighs on our minds day in and day out, but that we never really give much thought to: uncertainty.
For many people (myself included) we live in a time of uncertainty. After the most recent election cycle, people of various groups, nationalities, sexualities, etcetera all face the future with a large degree of uncertainty, wondering if the next four years will be stormy for them. This country is divided in a big way, and all sides seem vicious in the defense of their beliefs. I caught myself thinking over this as I was walking through an airport not too long ago, looking at the sea of the faces around me. As a non-heterosexual, I have become guarded in my speech. I watch what I say and who I say it around carefully, and meet most sentences with a certain level of apprehension. I’ve received threats of violence against my sexuality before, and I’ve been called the six letter “F” word more times than I can count, but never before have I looked at a crowded room and felt such unease around strangers. I don’t know these people. I don’t know what they believe in. Before 2016 this never bothered me, but before 2016 I was never so aware that there was such a large portion of people that disapproved of who I am, or who hated me simply because I was being me. Let me tell you, it’s not a good feeling. However, I felt another form of uncertainty. Being a white male, I looked at the faces of the women and people of other races around me, and I was uncertain how they perceived me. It’s no secret that white males are one of Trump’s biggest demographics, so when these people look me in the eye, what are they thinking? Are they suspicious of me? Do they feel a sense of disdain for me simply because some of my cohorts harbor an aversion toward them? Or is there something that I can do or say to them that will prove that I’m not one of those people? This type of uncertainty is a tricky thing to overcome.
As a millennial I face a wide degree of uncertainty. Some of you non-millennials might read this thinking, “oh, here we go…” and I understand that everyone has their own problems, but each generation faces a unique set of problems that the previous generations didn’t have to account for. In this day and age it seems that there are more college graduates than there are jobs requiring college degrees. It seems I’m one of the lucky few that found a job within two months of graduating college that was both directly related to my field of study AND that paid well above minimum wage. Part of it was that I had worked my ass off in college and graduated in under four years with honors, but the other half came back to the old saying, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Had I not buddied up with people I knew in my field through high school and college, I probably never would’ve landed this job. This scenario is not the same for millions of millennials, and the whole time I was getting my degree there was a little voice in the back of my head saying, what if… The job field in my particular field of study is already quite saturated. What if I have to move back in with my parents for a few years? The licensing process for my job is long and rigorous, and there’s a ton of liability involved. What if I screw up and have to start my life all over? There’s a lot of pressure on me to find a job that’s “productive and prolific,” rather than creative and effervescent. What if I get stuck with a job I hate for the rest of my life? These questions that our minds conjure up leave us with a very uneasy type of uncertainty.
In general, I feel that most forms of uncertainty stem from humanity’s fear of the unknown, and unless you’re some type of clairvoyant (in which case I’d appreciate next week’s Powerball numbers), the future is the pinnacle of the unknown. We don’t know for sure what tomorrow’s stock market prices are going to be, or what our next big “life event” will be, or even how the next day’s weather will really turn out, and I think on some subconscious, yet fundamental level, that scares us. Humans are all about knowledge and control, and you can’t control what you can’t predict, but if there’s any advice that I can give people from my own personal experience, it’s that you have to face each day with courage and confidence; courage that you have the ability to overcome any obstacle that life might throw at you, and confidence that even if you fail, you did the right thing.
