How To Handle Uncertainty
A reframe for feeling helpless. Plus, AAPI female founders, the unanswered questions of Alice Munro and a steamy Korean dating show.
“Honey, do you want soft serve?” A mom asks her child from outside a bathroom stall as I’m washing my hands in the public bathroom at a food hall the other day. “What’s soft serve?” The young girl asks, as she sits on the toilet. This is one of the most common conversations I overhear between parents and their children—a child either asking a parent what something is or the parent explaining things at random without the child asking. Every time I witness this, I consider if I’d have the ability to become a walking encyclopedia to a child who is learning everything for the first time. How would I explain the things I still don’t quite understand myself (like astronomy)? As they say, you don’t know what you don’t know. A child, then, reveals just how much we don’t know.
At some point between childhood and adulthood, we come to accept that we can’t know everything, and that some things just can’t be explained. An…