Wellness by Nathan Hill, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153203: "They find a view of the world that agrees with them, a spot that feels safe and secure, and they plant themselves on that spot and don’t move.
Because if they did move, their certainty and security and safety in the world would fall apart, and that’s too scary and painful to contemplate.
So people prefer their illusions — that the world is definitely a simulation, or that acupuncture is a thing, or that juice cleanses work, or that Ebola was created by the government.
It’s a little assertion of sovereignty amid the chaos.
In the face of insurmountable threats and distressing precarity and pain, the body longs, more than anything, for certainty.
You could say that certainty is, in fact, the flip side of pain — it’s what pain looks like reflected off the fun – house mirror.
When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention .
This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband.
What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty…