Simone Stoltzoff

He was one of the first people to link intolerance for uncertainty with mental health anxiety disorders.

And what Dugas told me is that when people are particularly intolerant of uncertainty, he sees one of two behaviors.

One is they become obsessive information gatherers.

The other extreme is people become extremely impulsive.

So I went into Max's story and when I went down and spent time with him in LA, thinking that he was able to tolerate uncertainty better than any of us.

But I came away thinking that maybe by outsourcing your decisions to this algorithm, it's just another way of avoidance.

It's another way of not necessarily taking responsibility for the choices of your life.

And Dugas argues that there's actually a middle path that is a little bit more adaptive.

But I do think it's instructive.

If you feel like you've had too many of these rinse and repeat days, what might you do to microdose uncertainty?

Maybe you take a little different route to work or you go to a restaurant that you've never been to.

And through exposing yourself to that novelty, you not only discover more about yourself, but you're training yourself to be able to be more tolerant for uncertainty in the future.

So rather than having very fixed goals or having a certain idea of my 10-year plan, I try to treat my life a little bit more like a prototype, like an experiment.

and try to approach the uncertainty in my life with curiosity instead of fear.

There's this idea from Buddhism that I really like, which is to focus on the next right action.

When we're faced with uncertainty, I think it's really easy to loop through all of the worst-case scenarios or all of the logistical and emotional ramifications if things don't go our way.

But rather than worry about all of those next steps, how might you try to stay grounded in your sphere of influence, of what you can control right now?

It's incredibly disempowering to have a fixed idea of exactly how things will go because that robs you of the ability to shape it.

And so that's something I come back to again and again.

I actually don't want a predictable or a certain future.