Simone Stolzoff

And the second thing it does is it robs us of the practice of sitting with what we don't know.

So like 10 years ago, I might've been fine not knowing the name of a given actor.

And now if I don't know the name of an actor, I feel an almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket.

I am not

Well, the cliche is that you write the book that you need to read.

And so the reason why I wrote this book is that I am not very tolerant of uncertainty myself.

I'm a natural ruminator.

So I'll get stuck on a question, let it loop in my mind.

I like to play my own devil's advocate.

So when I'm trying to make a decision, I'll like make up my mind and then like think about all the reasons why I'm wrong.

And so I'm not very good at dealing with uncertainty.

And yet I know that it is an increasingly adaptive and important skill.

And so the benefit of being a journalist is I don't have to have all the answers myself.

I can go out and talk to the philosophers and the economists and the psychologists and then present it in 200 pages for you.

It's a great question.

I think the big one is a mitigation of our anxiety.

And so if you think about worry and anxiety as being primarily thinking about things that haven't happened yet and getting anxious about them, that is not necessarily beneficial.

And so there's this researcher named Mikel Dugas, who was the first to link a lot of today's mental health disorders with our intolerance of uncertainty as sort of the base underlying case.

The benefit is that when you are comfortable with uncertainty, you can see uncertainty not as a threat, but as a potential opportunity.

So think about any sort of genre busting piece of art or scientific breakthrough or innovative company.