Consider this: you simply can’t find some things by looking for them.

For example, if you’re looking for happiness, you must be necessary unhappy: after all, happy people don’t look for happiness. This is a reversal of the commonly believed cause-and-effect relationship, the idea that we are unhappy, and therefore we seek to be happy. In truth, the act of searching for happiness continuously reinforces the negative identity of lacking-happiness, of being unhappy. In other words, we seek to be happy, therefore we are unhappy. Paradoxically, to find happiness, we must first stop searching for it.

This works for all sorts of things: success, confidence and love, to name just a few. Think of a poor, lonely soul, who is desperately looking for someone to complete them, believing this will finally give their lives meaning. Think of a rich and successful entrepreneur, who buys an exorbitantly expensive art-piece at an auction, believing that this will finally give them envious credibility and prestige. Think of a hapless office worker, buying and reading one business self-help book after the other, believing that one of them will finally make them rich or catapult their career.

Before you get too excited, no, I don’t know how to find love, gain prestige or get rich, but I definitely know a good strategy of how not to achieve these things: actively searching for them. Are you convinced? If not, I’m afraid I can’t instill in you a certitude. In fact, it is specifically our tendency of looking for incontestable facts that I wanted to discuss in greater detail.

The young English poet John Keats once had a disagreement with his friend, a certain literary critic named Charles Wentworth Dilke. Later, writing of this conversation to his brother, Keats wrote this:

At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

What Keats refers to as ‘negative capability’ is the idea of living without constantly reaching for certainty, in fact accepting it and embracing the mysteries. He observed this characteristic among many great writers, such as Shakespeare. Given how much Keats treasured literary art, this is him practically saying that negative capability is all that really matters in the world, a thought Soren Kierkegaard echoed with his best-known adage: “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”.

I think the idea can be simplified even further: after all, it’s simply about managing incomplete information. When faced with incomplete information, we have two choices: we may either accept that we have incomplete information and make the most of it, or demand guarantees, and subsequently exert much time and effort in vain. Of course, you already know which choice many people make.

We, the so called ‘modern people’, operate on many positivistic principles and therefore yearn for incontestable facts. Instead of legitimate science, what we actually end up with is scientism: growing confidence despite dwindling knowledge. In our hubris, we overestimate the power of logic and rational thinking. We want to understand reality, but through our crude approximations of it. We use simplistic mental models, as it’s the only way we can reasonably engage with something as vast and as complicated as reality. Let me tell you: in any contest between your wishes and reality, reality always wins!

Looking for certitude is a fool’s errand: the only thing that can be certain is uncertainty itself and even finding that is not easy: Heraclitus expressed it around 500 BCE, when he said “he who does not expect the unexpected will not find it, for it is trackless and unexplored.” Yes, the unknown is frightening, in fact it has always been our greatest fear. We make all these rules to protect us from the unknown and trying to impose a semblance of order on our otherwise chaotic lives, only these rules constantly get in the way. They take away from our adaptive flexibility, inhibit creativity all the while we forget why we thought of these rules in the first place…

To conclude, don’t go looking for things that can’t be found. Accept incomplete information with humility. As for rules, follow the advice given by the current Dalai Lama: “know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”