Lean on uncertainty

Radical change offers a chance to tell a better story about yourself.

Last night as I walked home from my office in midtown Manhattan, the cold biting at my exposed hand holding my briefcase, I passed a man arguing with his phone — sharp, jagged words about missed payments and broken promises, his voice strained and urgent.

I caught only a few sentences but they stuck with me. As if his whole day had gone awry because something he thought was a sure thing was not so stable after all.

I’m someone who leans into certainty. Most people are that way, I think, but certainty is like thin glass waiting to shatter. As solid as it feels to have a job, learn a city, and befriend the people in your building, these things have a way of shifting beneath our feet.

I used to believe security was something you earned. Work hard enough on the right projects (like, say, building a media startup) and your odds of finding solid ground rise.

I’m thinking now that certainty is less of a prize and something closer to a shadow — it moves when you reach for it, disappears in different lighting, and drifts off when you don’t pay attention.

New York is a testament to that. It’s an economic machine made of steel and concrete that’s lasted generations. What could be a more reliable anchor?

Yet if you spend enough time here, the many millions of commuters moving in different directions confirms that certainty dwindles by the second.

My favorite barbers and baristas have vanished overnight. Old buildings get replaced all the time. The city’s skyline itself bends and recalibrates as if in protest of what’s permanent.

Several years of reporting and writing stories — first in Hong Kong, then at Business Insider, and now for Opening Bell Daily — has given me the feeling of making a small corner of reality concrete, over and over.

Even my blog posts make me feel that much more certain about one specific idea.

We’re built to want the solid stuff. Answers. Clarity. Finish lines.

Publishing on the internet is one way I try to give myself more of that. The handful of times in the last eight years where my pen ran dry were less enjoyable and more unsettling.

But maybe that’s the trick of it. The unsettling moments — writer’s blocks, overheard arguments, barbers who leave town — are what remind us that certainty isn’t a foundation we stand on but a story we tell ourselves.

A good one, sure, with clean edges and a satisfying end, but a story all the same.

I wonder if the man on the phone would agree.

I don’t have a tidy takeaway here because life is too big and not nearly convenient enough for a single closing thought. Then again, maybe the calculus is just simpler than I want it to be: Things change and we adapt.

Put that way, change isn’t a burden.

It’s an opportunity for a better story.

Have a great week,

Phil Rosen,
Co-founder, editor-in-chief, Opening Bell Daily