The Paradox of Certainty and Creativity

Much of human behaviour can be traced to a single, powerful drive: our need to reduce uncertainty and increase certainty. From everyday routines to the vast systems we build as societies, we are constantly working to predict, stabilize, and control our environments. This is not weakness—it is survival. For millennia, the unknown has signalled potential danger, and so our brains evolved to treat uncertainty as a threat. The stress it provokes is profound, and it shapes how individuals and entire cultures operate.

And yet, here lies a paradox. While certainty protects us, it also confines us. True creativity—the kind that changes how we see the world—emerges not from certainty but from uncertainty. Creativity begins with a question, with an openness to possibility, with the courage to say, “I don’t know.” Certainty closes doors. Uncertainty keeps them open.

Psychological research calls this tolerance for ambiguity: the ability to remain steady in the face of the unknown, to resist the impulse for premature closure. Those who are most creative—artists, scientists, innovators—share this ability to dwell in uncertainty long enough for new connections to appear. Neuroscience supports this too: when we cling to certainty, we fall prey to confirmation bias, searching only for evidence that reinforces what we already believe. Our vision narrows. But when we allow ourselves to not know, we expand the field of what is possible.

Creativity is, in essence, the practice of seeing differently. It is the act of connecting what seems irrelevant, of stepping outside assumptions, of welcoming questions rather than rushing to answers. This requires a kind of psychological flexibility, but also a deeper trust: that within the discomfort of not knowing lies the seed of transformation.

So the challenge before us is not to eliminate uncertainty—an impossible task—but to cultivate comfort within it. The more at ease we become with ambiguity, the more fertile the ground for creativity becomes. For in the space between knowing and not knowing, between the comfort of the familiar and the openness of the unknown, lies the birthplace of imagination—and with it, the possibility of progress.