For most of human existence, there were few choices but to accept uncertainty.
You couldn’t know what the weather would be tomorrow or when the next rain might fall. You’d be oblivious to the plaque filling your arteries or the hurricane forming offshore. Your crops or cattle or children might be healthy one day and dead the next, and probably no one could ever tell you why.
Nor would you expect to know this information. You would be sensitive to signs of approaching danger, and take precautions against calamity. But you would be humbled by the unknowable so often that you would call it by name: fate, nature, the spirits, God.
Today, we can predict and optimize our lives in ways that earlier generations could hardly imagine. Our tools can tell us the weather anywhere on earth, our loved ones’ exact locations and the odds of virtually any conceivable occurrence.
When misfortune strikes us now, we often feel as though we should have seen it coming. We chastise ourselves for missing the signs, or blame others for not warning us. We can control so much that we forget we can’t control everything. We confront the unknowable so infrequently that we forget we are, in many ways, as helpless against it as we have always been.
Dr. Anna Lembke is a professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. In her research and in her patients, she sees firsthand how hard it is to navigate a 21st century world with brains that haven’t really been updated since our hunter-gatherer days.
Her 2018 bestseller “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence” explored why humans suffer in a world engineered for reward. Her new book, “Radical Surrender: Letting Go in a World Addicted to Control,” is about why we suffer in a world designed for certainty — or more accurately, the illusion of it.
Humans “evolved in a very chaotic, uncertain world where fire, flood, famine, you name it, was just around the corner. And so, in order to survive, we had to develop these very sophisticated prediction machines — our brains — that would allow us to predict what might happen next,” she said.
It feels good when the world lines up with the map in our mind: Our children behave as we want, the morning commute is routine. When reality falls short, the resulting feelings of anxiety, shame, anger or fear signal to us that something needs to change: either our own beliefs and expectations or (as is often our preference) the actions of all of those idiots out there.
Technology allows us to make far more predictions than once were possible. It has also created more opportunities to feel terrible when reality doesn’t match the plan.
“Our healthy instinct to want to reduce uncertainty [has been] taken to such an extreme that it has become maladaptive,” she said.
As one would expect from a psychiatrist specializing in addiction, “Radical Surrender” deals with the neuroscience of compulsion and despair. Lembke discusses the parts of the brain that activate in moments of crisis or transcendence, and the cognitive theories that help explain why uncertainty feels so uncomfortable.
But she also explores the parts of suffering and recovery that her profession doesn’t always have words for.
After decades of studying the ways humans wrestle with fear, Lembke is convinced that the act of surrender is as important as the search for order and certainty. To thrive, she believes, the drive to control our fortunes must be balanced with submission to a force beyond ourselves.
“It’s this fascinating paradox. We both want control, and we want to merge with the greater-than,” Lembke said recently from her home in Palo Alto. “We desperately want that, and we desperately need it. And yet we’re always sort of toggling back and forth between the two.”
Lembke is not suggesting everyone throw up their hands and let the deity of one’s choice take the wheel. Surrender, she writes, is not about giving up or abandoning responsibility.
It’s about “relinquishing the belief that our effort alone can dictate outcomes,” she writes. It’s about accepting that there is no path to a pain-free life, and no alternative to the messy and often uncomfortable job of being human.
Twelve-step programs have long insisted that participants start by accepting the limits of human will and surrendering to a higher power. This facet of recovery has been studied less than the physical and neurochemical changes that go along with addiction and withdrawal.
That’s partly because science tends to focus on what’s measurable. It’s also because “God” — the term that many programs, and Lembke, use to describe that greater force — is about as loaded a word as there is.
Lembke was raised by German immigrants in a proudly secular household, and does not belong to any religion. She understands that words like “pray” and “faith” carry complicated and even painful associations. She struggled with them too.
“At some point I got to where I just decided — you know what? I don’t need to define it further. And that was a very liberating moment for me,” she said. “No one can tell me what I mean when I say God.”
In her view, English has too thin a vocabulary for this thing humans have grappled with across time and cultures, a desire that may predate any language or creed.
“We are fundamentally worshiping beings,” said Kent Dunnington, a philosophy professor at Biola University who spoke to Lembke for the book. “Religion is one of the great responses to that feeling that we’re made for more than 40 or 60 or 80 years of sort of bumbling around on the earth.”
Organized worship is not the only way humans seek purpose. There is also the popular option of working obsessively toward goals and achievements. Until her 20s, this was Lembke’s preferred route, one that led to a Yale undergraduate degree and a medical degree and residencies at Stanford.
“We’re trying to avoid the reality of our own mortality and our smallness in this vast universe. But at some point, it comes crashing in, and then what do we do with that?” she said. “Because we have so many ways to exert control, I think we are intolerant of even the merest uncertainty. And when real big uncertainty with a capital U comes crashing in, we lack — at least for me, I can say, I had no toolbox. I had no framework. I didn’t know where to begin, and all the science and all the psychotherapy just wasn’t enough.”
For Lembke, this moment arrived with the birth of her first child, Lucas.
Delivery room staffers immediately noticed unusual splotches on his skin. There was no controlling the agony that followed: not his diagnosis of congenital leukemia, his sudden death at six weeks or the late-pregnancy loss of the twins she conceived soon after.
It was the first important thing she couldn’t contain through hard work. Every attempt to manage or deny her grief just deepened the pain.
One dark night she went into her son’s room and collapsed by the empty crib.
She had no visions or sense of a holy presence. But she was conscious of asking something beyond herself for help. She felt herself release the need to be in charge, which let her stop blaming herself for how wrong things had gone.
“I accepted my brokenness, my terrifying need. No more striving to be perfect and separate, to dominate and exploit. I let myself simply be a part of, as messed up as the next guy,” she writes. “My sense of self was not obliterated, but gently resized.”
This is where a lot of us finally confront surrender, said Daniel Speak, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University: at a point of crisis, where every other option has been exhausted.
“Here’s a thing I can’t think myself out of, here’s a thing I cannot reason my way out of,” Speak said. “And the backstop against which all of this is bouncing is death.”
Acknowledging our limits is painful, he said. It reminds us of the big limitation we all face at the end. It may also be the only way to fully appreciate the time that comes before that.
“Humility is ownership of one’s limitations: I recognize and I own them and I’m not trying to run from them any longer,” Speak said. “And it might be that accepting these kinds of limitations . . . is really the only way to receive life as a gift.”
“Dopamine Nation” was embraced by a sector of biohackers and productivity devotees who read her explanation of the brain’s reward system and looked for ways to work it to their advantage.
In a culture where being “high agency” is lionized and winners take an ever-larger share of the pie, surrender and humility may be a tougher sell. Investors in longevity supplements and superintelligence may not be up for talk of limits and uncertainty. People may not get it.
Lembke’s let go of that too.
“I may lose a bunch of people who just want the recipe for more optimizing,” she said with a laugh. “Part of the surrendered life is just, like: I have no idea if anybody will even understand what I’m saying. But that’s OK, you know? That’s OK.”
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