The Price We Pay to Feel Certain

Why curiosity demands discomfort—and why we keep avoiding it

In the 1840s, childbirth in Europe was far from the predictable medical event we imagine today. At Vienna’s General Hospital — one of the most respected institutions of its time — women were dying of puerperal fever at rates so high that families feared the hospital almost as much as the disease itself.

And yet inside the maternity clinic, something didn’t add up.

Two wards, separated by only a few steps, produced radically different outcomes.

In the First Clinic, staffed by doctors and medical students, maternal mortality rates climbed as high as 10–18 percent. In the Second Clinic, run by midwives, far fewer women died.

Most physicians accepted the disparity as an unfortunate mystery — a statistical quirk, or a reflection of the patients themselves. Some blamed differences in women’s constitutions or social class.

But Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Hungarian doctor, didn’t buy it.

He began questioning everything — birthing practices, ventilation, linens, patient flow — until one overlooked difference stood out:

Doctors and medical students performed autopsies each morning, often on women who had died of the very fever they were trying to understand, and then went directly to the delivery room without washing their hands.

Midwives, on the other hand, did not participate in autopsies.

In an era before germ theory, the idea that “particles from cadavers” could transmit disease sounded speculative, even offensive. But Semmelweis tested it anyway. He required everyone in the First Clinic to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before examining patients.

Almost immediately, mortality dropped dramatically — often falling to around 1–2 percent.

Semmelweis’s finding carried an unbearable implication: if he was right, then doctors — the educated elite, the very symbols of progress — were the ones carrying death from the autopsy room to the delivery bed.

The idea was intolerable. Few could accept that invisible contaminants — a theory with no recognized scientific framework — might override their training, authority, and sense of professional identity.

So instead of celebrating the discovery, the medical establishment rejected it. Semmelweis met criticism, hostility, and professional isolation. His efforts to enforce handwashing grew more urgent; his letters more accusatory; and one by one, his colleagues turned away.

Eventually, he lost his hospital post. He was committed to an asylum, where he died in 1865 from infected wounds sustained during his confinement.

Only years later — after germ theory provided the missing scientific framework — would medicine recognize what he had seen with nothing more than observation, and the willingness to question what others took for granted.

The Comfort of Certainty

The Semmelweis episode happened almost two centuries ago. It’s easy to hear it now and feel a kind of historical distance — to think, we were so close-minded back then. But the instinct that crushed Semmelweis — the instinct to favor certainty over unsettling questions — hasn’t disappeared. It’s just found subtler, more efficient forms.

This afternoon, my nephew was driving me to the airport when I asked whether he was happy with the university he’d chosen. He hesitated, and then admitted that if he could do it over, he’d probably study psychology or history instead. Subjects that genuinely interest him. Subjects his parents dismissed as “not useful in the marketplace.”

In a year, he’ll graduate and step into the workforce. And if he’s fortunate, he’ll land under a manager who asks deep questions, who invites debate, who cares more about truth than reputation — someone who doesn’t treat curiosity as a threat.

That’s what I hope for him.

But we both know the odds. More likely, he’ll end up reporting to someone fluent in certainty — someone who rewards agreement, discourages independent thinking, and confuses compliance with competence.

And he’ll probably fit right in.

Not because he lacks curiosity, but because he’s been conditioned for that environment his entire life. He grew up inside a system designed to narrow his imagination just enough to keep him aligned — to prepare him to fit the world as it is, not the world he might one day challenge.

And even though my nephew has something Semmelweis never did — the internet — the platforms that dominate it today have built their own walls, quietly shaping what we see and how far our questions are allowed to travel.

The early promise of the internet — a place to wander, explore, and engage with ideas freely — has been broken, and every major platform is now engineered to hijack our curiosity with something that resembles it but is far more profitable: novelty.

And it’s easy to confuse the two because:

• both involve seeking

• both generate stimulation

• both feel good in the first few seconds

But novelty keeps us on the surface. It mimics the entry point of curiosity — but never takes us past it.

We jump from video to video, quote to quote, in an endless loop where hours disappear, and we’re left with little more than the sense that we’ve been busy.

The moment discomfort appears, the moment uncertainty knocks, we’re served something new to soothe us. Something easier, lighter, faster.

I feel that pull constantly. When writing gets hard, I instinctively check my email. When reading becomes dense, I want to open another tab. When an uncomfortable emotion shows up, my phone becomes magnetic. When an idea grows complex, it feels simpler to ask ChatGPT for a summary than to wrestle with it myself.

And that’s how constant novelty makes sure we never stay long enough to follow our curiosity.

The Discipline of Curiosity

For curiosity to emerge, you need a sense of psychological safety.

When you feel safe, you don’t worry that your boss will fire you for being wrong or for questioning an idea. You know you can change your mind without losing your friends or family. Your relationships aren’t conditional on agreement.

Still, it would be a mistake to treat this as only an external problem — as if our curiosity lived entirely at the mercy of bosses, platforms, or institutions.

How often do we postpone a hard conversation just to avoid discomfort? How often do we reach for the same apps, not out of interest, but as an easy exit from boredom or uncertainty? How often do we swallow a question because we don’t want to look naïve or uninformed?

Curiosity can evolve our thinking—but only if we’re willing to tolerate the discomfort that comes with it.

That willingness to sit with discomfort is often mistaken for defiance, especially in environments that reward certainty and speed. But curious people aren’t rebellious for the sake of rebellion. They’re simply unwilling to outsource the search for truth to consensus. If everyone believes X, and X still feels unresolved, they keep digging.

For them, the question becomes a companion—something they live with, rather than rush to resolve.

If you choose—deliberately—to sit with what confuses or intrigues you instead of escaping it, your relationship with thinking begins to change. Instead of reaching for certainty, you reach for understanding.

Over time, you start asking better questions:

• “What’s actually happening here?”

• “Why do people assume this?”

• “What am I overlooking?”

• “What might be true if the opposite were actually true?”

Leonardo da Vinci filled pages with questions most people dismissed as trivial—why a bird stays aloft, why water moves the way it does, why people yawn. He didn’t treat curiosity as a shortcut to answers, but as a discipline of attention — a commitment to notice what others rushed past.

That’s why curiosity matters. It allows you to loosen what no longer fits, revise your assumptions, and let your understanding of the world grow more precise—and more honest.

Because the risk isn’t making mistakes while exploring.

It’s mistaking certainty for clarity—and never looking beyond what already feels settled.

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