certainly uncertain

when i was 15, my parents deleted all the food in our house.

every cabinet opened and emptied into the sea of a gazillion gallon garbage bags floating through the room that used to resemble a kitchen.

a wasteland.

"we're gonna make some changes." — my mom and pop

they'd spent a decade in comfort, in routines they never examined, habituating advice they never confronted.

and they realized their example was about to be mine.

so, slaughter the snacks. crush the chips. pour the soda down the drain.

yes, it seemed like mental illness at the time. yes, i was worried. the genre of change is horror. even though i might have felt like leaving the theater, i gave it a shot.

because why not? all our snacks sucked anyway. whatever, crush the chips.

i didn't have the word in my head at the time but this was my introduction to agency.

i've since learned that agency is a sledgehammer. it doesn't care about permission, what's normal, or your crippling fear of the unknown.

it just breaks shit, and then you're forced to build it better.

in practice, this meant taking everything back to first principles. an infinite loop of "how" or "why," followed by action. sometimes you just have to guinea-pig yourself until something works.

that's not always fun. usually it isn't. but we're either growing or we're dying.

and i was sure that i had more life to live.

so i learned to decipher the hieroglyphics of modern "food" ingredients, learned to cook, to clean, and live better.

my parents constructed the on ramp but i had to drive, no GPS. and at this point, i know there's no way to know where i'll end up, with anything. ever.

another example:

i was sure i'd be a musician. played songs to a packed room every week. still in love with inviting a crowd to lose their sense of reality with me, one chord at a time.

but trying to make money from it? now it's a job. now i have to do things i don't want to do. within that phase i became a dad, and the venn diagram of those two lives lost their overlap.

could i have anticipated that? never. but it happened and i charged into the future again.

instead of coming home at 5am, i woke up and taught myself to code at 5am. grinding for free until i was grinding for hire. and now i'm leading engineering at a killer startup.

i've changed so much since i was 15. even the last five years defied my imagination. there's no way i can predict the next five.

so now the only thing i'm certain of is that certainty is like sand falling through the cracks of your fingers. non-corporeal. a ghost. something you think is there, and even if it is, its fleeting nature means it might as well have never existed.

so yeah, i tend to avoid people who beat their chest and scream "i know things" at parties. give me a dash of "maybe" and you have my ear. confidence in knowing you can't know.

the only thing that i am absolutely certain of is that none of us know anything for certain.

certainly uncertain.

we experiment with stories and play them out through our own frame. there's freedom knowing the world offers no guarantees, we just play the game and see what prizes get spit out in exchange for our best effort.

just show up and try. agency in action.

but it's not free, for me anyway. a side effect of basking in uncertainty is the compulsion to devour any bit of knowledge in arm's reach.

kind of ironic. i know i don't know anything, yet cannot help trying to. and worse, the more i learn, the more i realize all the variables are never in your control anyway.

for example, i won't drop anything in a shopping cart without ruthlessly interrogating every ingredient. the problem being that ingredient definitions are transient so if i don't stay up to date on the current legislative fuckery, i'm getting dosed with printer ink.

but i don't think that ever changes. you can spend every waking minute optimizing and then get heat stroke at a kid's birthday pool party.

and what was the point?

sometimes it's ok to crush the chips, you know, in one's mouth.

i can be certain i'm gonna die, probably not today. but maybe.

it's okay not to know.