People have thought for thousands of years that they were living in the time of a great final battle against eternal tyranny — and that they were destined to fail.

There’s a strange comfort in being certain of doom. It makes the world simple and understandable. Predictable, and therefore less jarring. Doom is invulnerable to good news — in fact, good news is always bad news in the framework of doom, because it means delaying the inevitable and inviting false hope.

But the real story of the last several thousand years is that the world is complex. People are more complex than we could’ve understood even a hundred years ago. And the universe may be even stranger than we possibly can imagine.

I’m not telling you to be certain of a positive outcome. I’m just telling you to let go of certainty.