Simone Stolzoff

This guy has really severe OCD.

So the extreme example of someone who has a lot of doubt in their life and this decision about which MP3 player to buy takes over his life.

He starts like comparing them and then thinking he didn't listen to enough hip hop.

And so he listens to a little more hip hop and then he thinks about the aesthetics, but it's going to be in his pocket the whole time because the aesthetics matter.

And this sort of flip-flopping of looking for certainty is just an example of how much time and energy we tend to waste on decisions that are a little bit more reversible than we may think.

I'm glad you brought up chat GPT.

I think part of the reason isn't just that the world is incredibly uncertain right now.

It's also that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline.

So there's this great research study from this researcher named Nicholas Carlton called

who found that the rise of the internet, and particularly mobile phones, is correlated with intolerance of uncertainty.

I think phones do two things.

One is they bring all of the world's uncertainties into our pockets.

So now we can track the whereabouts of our kids.

We can track crises that are existing on the other side of the planet.

But that often just fuels our anxiety.

And the second thing it does is it robs us of the practice of being able to sit with what we don't know.

Now we feel like every big question of our life, whether it is which MP3 player to buy or what job to take or who to marry, is something that can be approached with the same framework that you might approach a Google query that has a definite answer.

Whereas some of these decisions are never going to have definite certainty.

You have to be able to have the trust in yourself to make decisions without knowing how they'll turn out.

I mean, I think I'm not arguing for the value of not Googling.