To be human is to suffer from a peculiar congenital blindness: On the precipice of any great change, we see with terrifying clarity the firm footing we stand to lose, but we fill the abyss of the unfamiliar before us with dread. Instead of envisioning the gratifications and growth awaiting on the other side, we focus on potential losses. We mistake the absence of certainty for the presence of danger.
Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this paradox when he wrote, “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Rainer Maria Rilke echoed the sentiment: “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.” And yet, when faced with truly transformative experiences, we find ourselves paralysed, unable to imagine the nature and magnitude of the transformation before us.
The Vampire Paradox: How Can We Choose What We Can’t Imagine? Philosopher L.A. Paul illustrates this dilemma with a thought experiment: If you were given the chance to become a vampire painlessly, with incredible superpowers, and with all your friends having already made the leap and loving it would you do it?
The catch is until you become a vampire, you can never truly understand what it’s like to be one. How, then, can you make a rational decision? Your human mind can only conceive of loss the forfeiture of your current self but it cannot accurately predict the potential joys of this unknown future. As Paul writes, “You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it.”
This hypothetical mirrors many of our biggest life choices. Becoming a parent, moving to a new country, changing careers, falling in love. Each of these experiences holds the potential to fundamentally reshape us, but we cannot know in advance exactly how. And so, we hesitate. We resist. We attempt to evaluate the unknown with the only tools we have our current perspective, shaped by our current experiences. But that is an incomplete picture it is like trying to understand flight from the ground.
The Limits of Our Imagination, Cognitive biases play a role in this resistance. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert reminds us, “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” We assume that the person we are now is the person we will always be. We cannot accurately imagine how we might grow, evolve, or find joy in circumstances we have never encountered before. As Paul puts it, “For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it.”
In other words, we are not just making a choice about our future we are making a choice about who we will become. And that future self, with different experiences and a new perspective, may see the world entirely differently from the way we do now.
When faced with transformative experiences, our instinct is often to cling to the familiar. But certainty is an illusion, and avoiding change does not preserve us it merely keeps us from discovering who we might be. Instead of seeking guarantees, we must learn to embrace the discomfort of not knowing. We must learn to choose transformation not because we fully understand what lies ahead, but because we trust in the capacity of our future selves to navigate it.
If we never allow ourselves to take the leap, we may never know what it truly means to fly. The most important decisions in life are not about avoiding uncertainty they are about stepping into it, with courage and curiosity, and trusting that what we cannot yet imagine may hold the very best of what we have yet to experience.
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