Growing Up Is Mostly Losing Certainty

On leaving certainty behind and learning to live with ambiguity.

When I was younger, I imagined adulthood as a destination where all the uncertainty would finally disappear. I thought there would come a day when I would know exactly what I wanted to do, where I wanted to live, who I would love, what success would look like, and how I was supposed to move through the world. Adults seemed to possess an invisible instruction manual that I simply hadn’t been given yet. They spoke with confidence, made decisions without hesitation, and carried themselves with a certainty that I mistook for wisdom. Looking back, I don’t think I envied their freedom as much as I envied their apparent conviction. I believed that growing up meant collecting answers until there were no important questions left to ask.

Nobody hands you the map. You just keep catching trains.

Instead, growing up has felt like watching all of those neat little answers dissolve into more complicated questions. Somewhere between leaving home, moving across countries, meeting people whose lives looked nothing like mine, and realising that every person carries a private world of fears and contradictions, certainty stopped feeling like something I was approaching and started feeling like something I had quietly left behind. I used to think there was one right career waiting for me if I worked hard enough, one version of success that would finally make me feel as though I had arrived, one city that would become home forever, and one love that would make every previous disappointment make sense. Life has been much less interested in giving me conclusions than it has been in teaching me to sit with ambiguity.

There was a time when I believed that passion arrived fully formed, that artists woke up inspired, that writers always knew what they wanted to say, and that people with impressive lives had simply figured something out that the rest of us hadn’t. Then I started paying closer attention. I noticed that the people whose work I admired were often full of doubt, endlessly revising, questioning themselves, changing directions, beginning again. I realised that being an amateur isn’t something you leave behind after enough practice; in many ways it is a permanent condition of caring deeply about anything. Every new project asks you to become a beginner again, and every meaningful pursuit humbles you in ways certainty never could.

The older I get, the more I realise that certainty is often just a story we tell ourselves because the alternative is frightening. We invent five-year plans because admitting that life can change overnight feels unbearable. We convince ourselves that if we make all the right decisions, everything will unfold neatly, even though almost everyone I have met carries a life that looks different from the one they once imagined. Some people fall in love with someone they never expected. Others leave careers they spent years building. Friendships quietly fade without anyone doing anything wrong. Families change, cities become memories, dreams evolve, and versions of ourselves that once felt permanent slowly become strangers. None of this happens because we failed. It happens because life is alive, and living things rarely move in straight lines.

I think one of the strangest parts of growing older has been realising that my parents were never superheroes pretending to be ordinary people; they were ordinary people trying very hard to be superheroes. As children, we imagine adults as people who possess certainty, but adulthood has shown me that most people are simply making the best decision they can with the information they have. There is something unexpectedly comforting about that realisation. It means that everyone is improvising a little. Everyone is hoping they are doing enough. Everyone is carrying doubts they rarely confess aloud. The difference between children and adults is not that one group has answers and the other has questions. It is that adults learn how to keep moving even when the questions remain unanswered.

Living away from home taught me another kind of uncertainty. I thought moving abroad would transform me into a more confident version of myself, someone who knew exactly where they belonged. Instead, it made me realise that belonging isn’t a destination you reach but something you keep creating through ordinary rituals: finding a favourite café, recognising the regulars at a pub, discovering a quiet corner of a museum where you like to sit, taking the same walk often enough that it begins to feel like yours. I have loved places knowing I would eventually leave them, and I have left places only to discover that they continued living inside me. Perhaps home was never a fixed location after all. Perhaps it was always a collection of moments that refused to disappear.

Even the books I read have changed the way I think about certainty. When I was younger, I looked for books that agreed with me because they made me feel intelligent. Now I look for books that unsettle me because they remind me how much remains unseen. The writers I return to most often are not the ones who hand me conclusions wrapped in confidence but the ones who leave me with better questions than the ones I arrived with. I no longer think wisdom is measured by how firmly someone holds an opinion. I think it is measured by how gracefully they allow themselves to change their mind when life asks them to.

Perhaps this is why I have become less interested in people who always seem certain. Absolute certainty leaves very little room for curiosity, compassion, or surprise. It closes doors before we have had the chance to look through them. The people I admire most are those who are willing to admit they don’t know, who can say “I was wrong,” who remain students of the world long after everyone else has declared themselves experts. They understand that certainty can feel comforting, but curiosity is what keeps us growing.

I still don’t know what my life will look like five years from now. I don’t know which dreams I will outgrow, which friendships will become lifelong companions, which cities will continue calling me back, or whether the person I am becoming will recognise the ambitions of the person writing these words today. There was a time when that uncertainty would have terrified me because I believed that adulthood was supposed to feel like finally seeing the whole map. Now I wonder if no one has ever seen the whole map. Maybe we are all walking through a landscape that only reveals itself one step at a time, mistaking our small circles of light for complete understanding.

Growing up, then, is not the slow accumulation of certainty I once imagined. It is the gradual acceptance that certainty was never the prize. The real gift is becoming comfortable enough with uncertainty that it no longer prevents you from loving, creating, travelling, beginning again, or believing that the next chapter might still surprise you. If childhood is the confidence that every question has an answer, then adulthood is the quiet, humbling, and strangely beautiful realisation that some of life’s most important questions are not meant to be solved at all. They are meant to be lived.