The False Promise of Certainty: Why Everything You've Been Told About Security is a Smoke Screen

Society has a script for us all.

It reads something like this:

Get the right education. Land the stable job. Buy the sensible home in the good neighborhood. Save an appropriate percentage of your income. Find the reliable partner. Build the respectable life. Follow the rules. Stay in line. Don't rock the boat.

Do these things, we're promised, and you'll earn the golden ticket: security.

That coveted state where the ground doesn't shift beneath your feet. Where tomorrow looks reassuringly like today. Where the monster of uncertainty is kept safely behind locked doors.

Those who follow this prescription are lauded as responsible, mature, successful. Those who diverge are labeled as reckless, immature, or worst of all—failures.

But here's what nobody mentions during all those guidance counselor meetings and family dinner lectures about responsibility:

Security is a smoke screen. A convenient illusion. A collective agreement to pretend we have more control than we actually do.

THE GOSPEL OF CERTAINTY

From our earliest days, we're indoctrinated into the church of certainty. Its commandments are clear:

• Thou shalt value stability above joy
• Thou shalt choose predictability over possibility
• Thou shalt sacrifice freedom for safety
• Thou shalt measure worth by consistency
• Thou shalt fear the unknown above all else

The doctrine is reinforced at every turn. Education systems that reward conformity over creativity. Workplaces that celebrate the reliable worker bee over the unpredictable innovator. Social circles that praise those who maintain rather than those who transform.

We're taught there's virtue in building walls against change. Merit in constructing a life so routine it could run on autopilot. Honor in postponing desires in service of some future security that's always just around the next corner...if we just sacrifice a little more, plan a little better, control a little harder.

Meanwhile, those who question this dogma are treated with suspicion or pity:

"She left her corporate job to start her own business? In this economy? Poor thing."
"He ended a perfectly stable relationship because it didn't light him up? How immature."
"They're traveling instead of buying a house? They'll regret that when they're older."

The implication is clear: deviate from the security script at your own peril. Follow it, and you'll be safe.

Except for one inconvenient truth:

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

Take a good, hard look at the "secure" lives around you.

The 30-year corporate veteran laid off in a merger.
The "solid" marriage crumbling from within.
The "safe" investment wiped out by market shifts.
The "stable" industry disrupted into obsolescence.
The "dependable" health shattered by unexpected illness.
The "permanent" home lost to foreclosure or natural disaster.

None of these people failed to follow the security protocol. They did everything right by society's standards. They checked all the boxes. They played by the rules.

And still, the ground gave way.

Because here's the truth too dangerous to incorporate into our collective story: change is the only constant in life.

Not as a poetic metaphor. Not as a philosophical musing. As the fundamental reality of existence.

Everything—every relationship, every career, every possession, every identity, every bodily state—is in flux. Always has been. Always will be.

This isn't pessimism. It's physics. It's biology. It's the basic nature of reality that our security-obsessed culture teaches us to deny, avoid, or postpone reckoning with.

THE COST OF DENIAL

The price we pay for maintaining this collective illusion isn't just philosophical. It's practical. It's emotional. It's spiritual.

We channel our precious life energy into building fortresses against change that will inevitably crumble.

We make decisions from a place of fear rather than possibility.

We treat disruption as failure rather than transition.

We cling to what's familiar long after it stops serving us.

We trade our deepest longings for the anesthesia of routine.

We judge ourselves harshly when change arrives despite our best efforts to prevent it.

Most costly of all: we learn to distrust the one thing that could actually help us navigate change with grace—our own wild instincts, our intuition, our capacity for adaptation and renewal.

WHAT NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT THE ONES WHO "RISKED IT ALL"

Here's something I've noticed about people who step off the security treadmill to follow what calls to them, whether it's starting a business, pursuing art, leaving an unfulfilling relationship, or reimagining their life entirely:

They don't necessarily end up with less stability than those who stayed the conventional course.

Sometimes they find greater material abundance doing work aligned with their gifts.
Sometimes they build relationships with deeper roots because they're showing up as their authentic selves.
Sometimes they develop a resilience that serves them better than any external security ever could.

But even when they do face greater material uncertainty, they often report something surprising: the uncertainty feels more alive than the dead certainty of a life that wasn't truly theirs.

They'd rather navigate real waves in the open sea than drown slowly in the supposed safety of stagnant waters.

The question isn't whether they've found perfect security—no one has that. The question is whether they've found a way of being in relationship with uncertainty that feels worth the journey.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF SECURITY

This doesn't mean we throw everything to the wind and embrace chaos for its own sake. It doesn't mean we abandoned discernment or thoughtful consideration of consequences.

It means we recognize that true security was never about the absence of change.

True security comes from knowing you can adapt when the ground shifts.
True security comes from being in right relationship with impermanence.
True security comes from roots that run deep enough to weather storms but aren't rigid enough to snap in strong winds.
True security comes from a self that's larger than your job title, relationship status, address, or bank balance.

It comes, ultimately, from the humility to acknowledge that control is largely an illusion, and the courage to show up anyway—fully invested, fully alive, fully aware that everything transforms, including us.

RECLAIMING YOUR BIRTHRIGHT

So where does this leave us? If the security we've been sold is a mirage, what are we to do?

We begin by reclaiming what our security-obsessed culture has tried to breed out of us:

Our relationship with uncertainty. Instead of treating change as enemy, we can relate to it as the fundamental creative force it is. Not something to eliminate, but something to dance with.

Our instinct for aliveness. Beneath the layers of conditioning, your body knows the difference between choices that deaden and choices that enliven. This knowing is your birthright.

Our capacity for presence. When we're not pouring our energy into controlling the future, we can fully inhabit the present—the only moment that's ever actually guaranteed.

Our freedom to choose. Not between security and insecurity (both illusions), but between a life aligned with external prescriptions and one aligned with internal wisdom.

QUESTIONS THAT LEAD HOME

Here are some questions to sit with as you navigate your own relationship with the security illusion:

• Where in your life are you postponing aliveness in exchange for an illusion of security?
• What decisions would you make differently if you accepted that change is inevitable, regardless of how carefully you plan?
• What do you know in your bones about what brings you alive, but have been ignoring in service of "being responsible"?
• Where are you clinging to what's familiar even though it no longer serves you?
• What would it look like to build a relationship with uncertainty based on curiosity rather than fear?
• What forms of true security (adaptability, resilience, self-trust) have you neglected while pursuing external security?

THE COURAGE TO SEE CLEARLY

I'm not asking you to blow up your life tomorrow. I'm not suggesting you abandon all consideration of consequences or practical realities.

I'm inviting you to see clearly the water we're all swimming in—this collective delusion that if we just follow the right protocol, we can somehow achieve immunity from the basic nature of existence: change.

I'm suggesting that once you see it clearly, you might make different choices. Choices based not on the false promise of permanent security, but on what actually matters to you. What wakes you up. What makes your brief time on this wild earth feel worth the inevitable uncertainties.

This isn't recklessness. It's clarity.

It's the clarity to recognize that the conventional path doesn't actually deliver on its promise of security.

It's the clarity to acknowledge that change will find you whether you invite it or resist it.

It's the clarity to choose a life aligned with your deepest knowing rather than external prescriptions.

It's the clarity to see that the ground is always moving beneath all of us, and the question isn't whether we can stop it, but how we choose to dance with that reality.

The wild in me recognizes the wild in you. It knows you were born with everything you need to navigate the sacred uncertainty of being alive. It knows you're braver than you've been taught to believe. It knows there's more freedom waiting for you on the other side of the security illusion than you can imagine from within it.

The door isn't locked. It never was. The only question is whether you'll gather the courage to open it and step through.