This article is a follow-up on When the pillars collapse one after another.
On uncertainty, optionality, and preserving the possibility space.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about what happens when several of the pillars
holding up your life collapse almost at once.
At the end of that article, I was standing on something resembling an
empty field.
I deliberately left the story unfinished.
I didn't know what I wanted to build there.
I still don't.
But something about that field has changed.
It doesn't look empty anymore.
The instinct to rebuild
When something disappears, my instinct is to replace it.
As a software engineer, this is embarrassingly familiar. A component
fails, so you restore service. A dependency disappears, so you find a
replacement. Requirements change, so you adapt the architecture.
Something becomes uncertain, so you reduce the uncertainty.
Apparently, I had been applying roughly the same strategy to my life.
Relationship gone? Eventually find another one. Plans gone? Make new
plans. Career becoming uncertain? Find the next job. Stability
disappears? Rebuild stability.
Reasonable enough.
Except I had overlooked one thing:
Every decision creates a path forward.
And kills a bunch of others.
Every commitment reduces the number of possible future states.
And suddenly I had a name for what I was looking at.
Possibility space.
Possibility space
Software engineers know this problem very well.
At the beginning, everything is possible. Then someone makes a decision.
We choose a technology, define an interface, persist data in a certain
shape. Other systems start depending on it.
With every decision, the architecture becomes more real.
Which is another way of saying: the design space gets smaller.
That's fine. Eventually, somebody has to build the damn thing.
But we also know what happens when we commit too early. We build around
assumptions we haven't validated yet. We turn guesses into constraints.
And then spend years maintaining them.
I started wondering how often we do exactly the same thing with our
lives.
Where will I live? What will I work on? What will my career look like?
Who will I spend my life with? What's the plan?
Open questions are uncomfortable. They look suspiciously like unresolved
tickets.
So we try to close them.
But every answer trades possibility for certainty.
Sometimes that's exactly the right trade.
Sometimes we're just closing the ticket because we don't like seeing it
on the board.
Then I removed another pillar
This is where things became slightly absurd.
My job was one of the remaining stable parts of my life. I had been
there for seven years.
After everything else had become uncertain, the sensible response should
probably have been to hold on to that stability as tightly as possible.
Instead, I decided to leave.
So while writing articles about pillars collapsing around me, I
eventually walked over to one of the remaining pillars and removed it
myself.
Excellent risk management.
And no, I didn't leave because I had found The Next Thing™.
There is no shiny new position waiting for me. No startup announcement.
No master plan hidden in a drawer. Not even a particularly respectable
PowerPoint.
I left because I realized something deceptively simple:
Staying wasn't the absence of a decision.
Staying was a decision too.
And that decision increasingly constrained everything else: time,
energy, location, projects, learning, and the kinds of work I could
explore.
The stable option had a cost.
It consumed possibility space.
Uncertainty is the default
For most of my life, I treated uncertainty as the annoying transitional
state between two stable states.
Something changes. Things become messy. You figure them out. Stability
returns.
Nice little state machine.
Except reality seems to have missed the specification.
Jobs end. Companies change. Relationships change. People change. Bodies
change. Technology changes.
Plans encounter reality.
Maybe uncertainty isn't the exception.
Maybe uncertainty is the default.
Stability is something we construct locally and temporarily inside it.
That changes the question.
Instead of asking, How do I get back to certainty?, I am
increasingly asking:
How many meaningful moves remain available from here?
That is optionality.
Not keeping every door open forever. That's not optionality. That's
standing in a hallway.
Choices have to be made. Doors have to close. Things have to be built.
But there is a difference between making a decision because the time has
come to make it and making one because an open question makes you
nervous.
Right now, I have an unusual amount of freedom to explore. I can change
direction professionally, build something, learn something completely
new, travel, move, combine things that previously lived in separate
boxes.
And, importantly, discover that some of these ideas are complete
nonsense.
That's allowed.
Actually, it's required.
Exploration needs permission to fail.
The objective isn't to pick the perfect future from a menu.
There is no menu.
The objective is to explore enough of the possibility space that the
next commitment is based on something better than fear of uncertainty.
Controlled chaos with optionality
So no, I don't have a plan.
Well.
That's not entirely true.
I have plans. Far too many of them.
What I don't have is the plan.
There is no Gantt chart for my life. God help us if there ever is.
What I have instead is something closer to an operating model. I want to
explore aggressively, but commit deliberately. While information is
incomplete, reversible decisions are more valuable than decisions that
merely make things feel settled. Time and attention need protection
because without them there is no meaningful exploration in the first
place.
That also means running experiments without demanding that every one of
them turns into something permanent. Some will work. Some will lead
somewhere unexpected. Some will turn out to have been stupid ideas from
the beginning. I want enough runway to find out which is which without
every failed experiment becoming a crisis.
The point is not to avoid commitment. It is to avoid collapsing the
possibility space before I have learned enough from it.
I have no idea whether this is a brilliant strategy or an elaborate way
of making my life unnecessarily complicated.
Probably a bit of both.
For now, I call it:
Controlled chaos with optionality.
The field isn't empty
Which brings me back to that empty field.
When the pillars first disappeared, the spaces between them mostly felt
like loss. Naturally, I wanted to know what would replace them.
Now I'm less interested in answering that question immediately.
Because I've started to realize that the empty space itself has value.
There are sketches scattered across it now. Some are practical, some
ambitious, some ridiculous. Some contradict each other. Several will
probably never leave the sketchbook.
Good.
That's exactly what a design space is supposed to look like before
somebody starts pouring concrete.
I still don't know what the next architecture will be.
For once, I don't consider that a defect.
Uncertainty is the default.
Possibility space is the resource.
Optionality is how you preserve it.
The pillars are still gone.
But the space between them isn't empty.
It's where the possibilities are.
This article has also been published on Medium.
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