The Curse of Being Sure First

A few months after returning from Israel, I was sitting at my desk looking through pictures from my time there. I was scrolling through memories of classrooms, trips, dinners, late-night conversations and moments with people who had become friends when I stopped at one particular picture.

It was a photo of me standing outside the university campus with a group of classmates. Everyone was smiling. It looked ordinary, but something about it made me pause.

I remembered the person who took that photo. Not the person in the picture, but the person who existed before the picture was taken. The person who had spent months wondering whether he was making the biggest mistake of his life, repeatedly asking himself, “Is this really the right decision?”

Looking back, the question almost feels impossible. Not because the answer was obvious, but because the answer did not exist yet. I had to live with the decision before I could understand it.

For almost a decade, I have worked in the development sector, and over the last two years, much of my work has focused on sustainability. I have been fortunate to sit in rooms with incredible people, attend international conferences and participate in conversations about some of the biggest challenges facing humanity: climate change, sustainable cities, the circular economy, energy transitions and the future of our planet.

But despite my love for the field, something always felt incomplete.

Many sustainability conversations were built around examples from elsewhere. We spoke about European cities, European technologies and European models of sustainability. We discussed Copenhagen’s cycling culture, Dutch approaches to water management, Scandinavian sustainable design and global circular economy frameworks. These ideas are valuable, and there is much the world can learn from them.

But I kept asking a different question: where are the African stories?

Not Africa as a place where global ideas are eventually implemented, but Africa as a place where knowledge itself is created.

Where are the stories of earth architecture that allowed communities across the continent to design homes adapted to their environments for generations? Where are the examples of indigenous materials, local craftsmanship and ecological practices that existed long before sustainability became a global concept?

Why do some forms of knowledge become recognised as innovation while others are labelled tradition? Why do we sometimes look outside ourselves for solutions to challenges that communities have been navigating for centuries?

Those questions eventually shaped my academic interests. I became deeply interested in knowledge justice in sustainability and wanted to explore how African histories, philosophies and practices could contribute to global conversations about sustainability.

That was why I started searching for a master’s programme in African Studies with a sustainability focus.

My first thought was the University of Ghana. It had a strong African Studies programme, but I felt it was missing the sustainability component I was looking for. Then I considered SOAS in London. It covered many of the themes I was interested in, but after looking at the requirements, I realised I was not yet a strong enough applicant.

For a while, I wondered whether the timing simply was not right.

Then something unexpected happened.

A professor from my church shared a programme announcement in our church WhatsApp group. It was one of those forwarded messages that would have been easy to ignore. But something made me open it.

The programme was an MA in African Sustainable Communities.

I started reading, and the more I read, the more familiar the questions felt. There were courses in African Thought, African History, Sustainable Design in Africa and community development. It felt as though someone had taken the questions I had been carrying for years and created a space to explore them.

Then I reached the location.

Israel.

I remember thinking, “Israel?”

Of all places.

The timing could not have been more complicated. The events of October 7 had happened, and the news was filled with images of conflict and uncertainty. People around me had questions. I had questions.

“Are you sure?”

“Is this the right time?”

“Why Israel?”

And honestly, I did not have a perfect answer.

I wanted one. I wanted someone to tell me, “This is definitely the right decision. Nothing will go wrong. You will be safe. You will have an amazing experience.”

But nobody could give me that, because nobody knew.

I remember sitting with my laptop, reading different opinions and trying to calculate the future. I was looking for certainty in a situation where certainty did not exist.

Eventually, I had to accept something uncomfortable: the decision would not become clear before I made it. I had to make it and then discover what it meant.

So I went.

The reality was far richer than anything I could have predicted.

I became a student again. I sat in classrooms with people from different countries and backgrounds. I had conversations that challenged my assumptions and learned from professors who expanded the way I think about Africa, sustainability and knowledge.

I also experienced the simple joys of being young and alive. I travelled. I laughed. I went to parties. I made friendships. I discovered a version of myself that I could not have imagined before arriving.

None of those things appeared in my decision-making process.

No amount of research could have predicted the friendships I would make. No article could have explained the conversations that would change my thinking. No spreadsheet could have calculated the person I would become.

That is one of the strange things about life. The decisions that shape us most are often the ones we understand least at the moment we make them.

This is where I think we need to distinguish between risk and uncertainty. We often use the words interchangeably, but they describe different situations.

Risk exists when probabilities can be estimated. If I flip a coin, I know there is roughly a fifty percent chance of getting heads. When an insurance company calculates the likelihood of an accident, it is working with risk. When a business studies market trends before investing, it is assessing risk.

Risk does not mean something is guaranteed. It means we have enough information to make an informed estimate.

Uncertainty is different. It exists when we do not even know the probabilities.

Recently, I became involved in a farming investment. The numbers looked attractive. The projected return was clear, and the business model suggested a possible 20% return. Those are things we can analyse.

But then come the questions nobody can accurately calculate. What if rainfall patterns change? What if a disease affects the crops? What if an unexpected fire destroys the farm? What if the people managing the project disappear? What if something completely outside everyone’s expectations changes the entire situation?

These are not simply risks waiting to be calculated. They are uncertainties.

And most of the decisions that define our lives exist somewhere in that space.

Choosing a career. Moving to another country. Starting a business. Choosing a partner. Pursuing a PhD.

We are not solving mathematical equations. We are making choices in a world shaped by complexity, chance, other people’s decisions and events beyond our control.

Perhaps that is why our relationship with uncertainty is so difficult.

Our brains are not naturally designed to enjoy the unknown. Dr. Karl Friston’s theory of Active Inference suggests that the brain is constantly trying to reduce surprise. We build models of reality and update them as we encounter new information. In simple terms, the brain is constantly trying to work out what happens next.

The more predictable the world feels, the easier it is to prepare for it.

Our desire for certainty, then, is not simply a personal weakness. There is something biological behind it. The brain prefers a predictable future.

Life rarely provides one.

The problem is that we sometimes mistake uncertainty for danger. Because something is unknown, we assume it must be wrong. But uncertainty is also where growth happens.

Every meaningful experience begins with a question mark. A new relationship, a new career, a new country, a new idea, a new version of yourself.

If we wait until uncertainty disappears, we may spend our lives waiting for a moment that never comes.

That does not mean becoming reckless. It means learning to distinguish between what can be assessed and what can only be experienced.

We can research. We can seek advice. We can prepare. We can think carefully about consequences. But eventually, some questions can only be answered by living them.

The real problem with decision-making is not always that we lack information. Sometimes we demand a level of certainty that reality cannot provide.

The future will continue to be shaped by complexity, chance, other people’s choices and events beyond our control. We can prepare for some of them, but we cannot remove the unknown.

Perhaps the goal, then, is not to become certain before acting. It is to become capable of acting without certainty.

I think back to that photograph sometimes. At the moment it was taken, I had no idea how much it would come to mean to me. I certainly could not have predicted the friendships, lessons, experiences or changes in perspective that would follow.

All I knew before going was that I had a decision to make.

And perhaps that is all any of us ever really have.

We spend so much of our lives trying to predict every outcome and protect ourselves from every possibility. Yet almost everything that makes life meaningful exists on the other side of a decision we cannot fully guarantee.

Love. Growth. Adventure. Purpose. A life fully lived.

The future will remain unwritten. There will always be turns in the road that we cannot see.

And in the end, after all the choices, all the risks and all the unknowns, there is only one thing we can ever truly be certain of.

Death.