We live in a time that feels unfamiliar. The more information we have, the more insecure we seem to feel. The more complex the world becomes, the more we seek simple answers. And the greater the ambiguity around us, the more tightly we cling to beliefs, ideas and identities that give us a sense of solid ground.
It is understandable. It is human. And it is also where we begin to build a shell around ourselves and close off.
The problem does not lie in the search for security, but in confusing security with certainty. Certainty closes. Genuine security does not come from unquestioned certainties, but from knowing who we are well enough that we do not need to defend them at all costs.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ambiguity is not a problem to be solved, but the human condition. Those who insist on eliminating it, on finding definitive answers that impose order on disorder, do not find clarity. They find rigidity. And rigidity comes at a cost: we stop seeing what does not confirm what we already believe.
We see this everywhere today. Movements are growing that promise certainty in exchange for simplicity. Ideologies that history has already tested and rejected are resurfacing. Extremes are coming out of the drawer not because they are new or true, but because they respond to a real need: the need to know where we stand, who we are, and which side we are on.
But that is not the answer. It is as if we were treating the symptom with what makes it worse.
Genuine thinking, as John Dewey argued, always begins with disturbance. With the discomfort of a belief that no longer fits reality. Anyone who has never felt their own beliefs shaken has hardly examined them at all.
To doubt is not to collapse. It is the starting point for greater honesty.
But there is a condition: doubt without an anchor can feel paralysing. Openness without a compass becomes noise that unsettles us. This is where self-knowledge becomes essential, not to tell us what to think, but to help us understand where we think from. What our real values are, not the ones we declare casually. What drives us and what paralyses us. What we defend out of conviction and what we defend out of fear of change.
Without this inner work, we are swept along by the current, sometimes by others’ certainties, sometimes by our own need for comfort.
And this work is not done in isolation. Endless reflection does not bring clarity; it brings rumination. We need to go out, to see, to test. To expose our ideas to reality and to others. Curiosity, the genuine kind without the anxiety of arriving, is perhaps the most intelligent posture we can cultivate today.
To go against the current in this time is not to hold strong opinions and defend them at all costs. It is to have the courage to remain open when everything around us pushes us to take sides. It is to slow down when the pace demands speed. It is to say we need more time to breathe, to analyse and to make sense before moving forward.
And perhaps the hardest thing of all is to change our mind without feeling that we have betrayed something.
Changing one’s mind is not weakness. It is not inconsistency. It is a sign that we have kept thinking, and that reality has taught us something we did not yet know. In a culture that rewards conviction and interprets a change of position as a lack of character, doing so is genuinely courageous.
When confronted by those who accused him of contradiction, Keynes replied: when the facts change, I change my mind. And what about us?
Duarte Afonso Silva, Development Manager Executive Education at CATÓLICA-LISBON