Be allergic to certainty.

Our ecosystem demands and rewards it—claims of certainty, promises of gain, any marketing pitch of generalities or specifics to get you to part with your money or adopt some new perspective that serves the marketer. Pessimistic perhaps—I’m sure there are gentler and more well-rounded framings, but we just love to hear certainty, and those who are willing to dole it out reap rewards.

I say, be cautious but be open. As a teenager, I was obstinate—I would challenge those who claimed certainty, particularly in religious contexts, and steer the conversation toward plurality. I still find claims of absolute certainty dangerous because they are simultaneously appealing, attractive, and unaccommodating to the broader uncertainties of life.

The dangers of certainty are particularly glaring in the self-help world, where people often claim that if you just follow their method, you’ll achieve some promised outcome. The problem is, these techniques are often impractical when taken from a book alone—they aren’t solely designed to help you, but primarily serve as a sales funnel into expensive workshops or seminars. There, you're led to believe that with more training, you'll finally learn how to change your life. But even then, sustaining these practices in the chaos of modern life is incredibly difficult. And if you don’t see the results you were promised, the blame shifts to you: you didn’t try hard enough, you didn’t follow the method correctly. This is especially common with things like positive thinking, where the implication is that if you didn’t manifest your desires, it’s simply because you weren’t thinking positively enough.

Here’s the thing, though: I was throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Call me soft against snake-oil salesmen and the like, but I no longer spend my energy in verbal combat. It’s not worth the effort, neither for the hope of shifting the other’s perspective nor for my own sense of glory. Besides the energy savings, I was also missing valuable information. Sure, the certainty of the claims may be out of line. But understand them in context—we live in a society that demands certainty, that rewards it. Let those folks play the game and win the rewards. See if what they say has merit—then live and let live.

I’ve been reading Joe Dispenza’s Becoming Supernatural. Some of the claims are lofty. It follows a similar vein as The Secret did with the promise that one can visualize themselves into a new reality with intention and positive feelings. The book’s foreword didn’t do Dispenza any favors either by citing epigenetics as "rock solid science" and claiming with certainty that Li Ching-Yuen lived until 256 years old (the records for this are widely disputed as there is no evidentiary proof).

All that said, I’ve been keeping an open mind and enjoying the read. Who knows? Maybe I can meditate my brain waves into Theta and attract all the things that I want in life. Pretty high upside if I can stomach the loftiness of the claim. With upside claims like that, it might be worth a scoped period of experimentation to test it out.

How do you respond to claims of certainty? Are you persuaded by them or resistant? How do you find the balance between letting the good from the message in and protecting yourself from the dangers of certainty?