It is a truism in our moment in history that we live in an age of uncertainty. In a world driven by complex and varied interactions, using new technologies, and undergoing rapid economic and social change, we are experiencing new problems on a global scale. It seems like everything is unprecedented, unparalleled or new ground. Every day we are reminded of the terrors of domestic and international strife, war in Europe and the Middle East, turbulent economies, climate emergencies, natural disasters, fraught communities, political polarization, starving communities, those with no home, the rise of artificial intelligence … the list goes on. Every day, we experience, on an individual and collective level, fear and anxiety about our chaotic reality.
But is this feeling unique to us? Humans have, throughout history, confronted the weight of their past and the uncertainty of their present world. But does that history help us now?
Over a decade ago, I moved to Glasgow, Scotland, from my hometown in Belfast, Ireland, to pursue a Ph.D. in history. Like many newcomers to Scotland, I visited Edinburgh during the world-famous Fringe Festival. Since 1947, for three weeks in August, Edinburgh welcomes creative people, projects and art from around the globe, drawing in thousands of performers and crowds from Berlin to Chicago.
Wandering around Edinburgh’s Old Town, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to walk through the city hundreds of years ago. Admittedly, as someone who grew up in a society marred by sectarian conflict and violence, I often find myself looking out for evidence of the cruelties of history when visiting other countries. To a present-day tourist, historical Edinburgh would have been both familiar and unfamiliar. By 1560, the onset of the Scottish Reformation, when Scotland officially became a Protestant nation, the city was populated by around 12,000 inhabitants (a mere fraction of today’s population of more than half a million). Yet, the significant landmarks that draw visitors to the city to this very day — Edinburgh Castle, St Giles’ Cathedral, the Royal Mile — already dominated the city’s landscape by the 1300s.
There are, however, few tangible reminders of the various tragedies that beset the inhabitants of Edinburgh throughout history. The city has faced sieges, plagues, wars, riots, mighty fires and building collapses. During the high point of witch hunting in the early modern period, an outsized percentage of accused witches came from this region. The plague of 1645 was one of Edinburgh’s most devastating epidemics, killing half of the population. A city scarred by tragedy, yet revered for its heritage and beauty.
This history is, of course, not unique to Edinburgh — it’s present, yet often invisible, in every town, city and country on the planet. No matter where I am in the world, I often find myself wondering about how the inhabitants of bygone eras acted and reacted in the face of terrible changes and disasters, and how they coped with the uncertainties of life.
Looking backward
A history professor once told me that “we cannot ever seek to understand our present, let alone imagine a different future, without looking to our past.” It was then I learned that the study of history isn’t just collective — it’s personal. It requires us to look for answers to many of our existential fears, including our place within society, our hopes and dreams for the future, and how we can cope with the harshness of the world during the times in which we live.
History is a driving motivation to understand the facts and fictions of the world. It is a tool to comprehend the purpose of human existence and behavior. As historians, we often seek to provide answers to questions that remain inherently difficult, if not impossible, to answer.
In his book “The Terror of History,” historian Teofilo F. Ruiz reflected on Western humanity’s efforts to escape from history and its terrors — from natural disasters to the endless succession of wars and other human-made catastrophes. Ruiz described such acts as the “terrors of history” that uncomfortably sit alongside our own societies. Yet rather than focus on the historical event, Ruiz sought to shine a light on those people who were tested greatly, yet managed to continue with their lives. Here, we find small sacrifices and acts of courage in the face of uncertainty.
In June 1652, Jonet Wood, an ordinary woman from Glasgow, watched as what would become known as “the Great Fire of Glasgow” ripped through the houses of her friends and neighbors, the shops she patronized. The flames devoured the community, destroying about a third of the city. And there was no one but the people of Glasgow itself who could save them. Residents formed human chains, passing buckets of water between them in attempts to put down the flames.
When I began as a historian, I sought answers to fundamental questions like the nature of progress. Today I feel comfortable knowing that none of us really knows the vast majority of what happened in the past, or what is going to happen in the future.
But Wood went further. She ran back into buildings that were engulfed in flames, attempting to rescue those trapped inside. In the face of a literal wall of fire, she moved forward, endeavoring to save anyone she could. From a journal entry preserved from this time, we discover that the town council paid a local surgeon to cure Wood’s burns and nurse her back to health — a powerful measure of human resilience and kindness in the face of devastation.
When I look to history, I am most interested in these types of stories — the ones that have become easy to neglect. The stories of people who carried on with the grim and sometimes mundane details of everyday life. The people who endured while facing the unpredictability and chaos of life. The people who risked their own lives to save others.
It’s easy to learn about what happened in the past by definition of historic events, but it’s easier to forget the people who existed and persevered in the days and moments before and after the entries of textbooks. We forget to remember the nameless who kept going while facing tragedy, and those who refused to give in despite the hardship surrounding them. Every person alive today is the result of thousands of people who, against all odds, survived past tragedies. As humans, we have the capacity to be resilient, to come up with ideas, to transform who we are — especially in the face of uncertainty.
Threads Through Time
Our ideas about who we are and our place within an uncertain world often feel unique, but they’re tethered to the past. Literally and figuratively. Our ancestors faced angst and anxieties provoked by events and existential questions that feel eerily modern. Even prescient.
It is rare for historians to have access to eyewitness accounts of tragic events from nearly 2,000 years ago, and to learn how ordinary people reacted in the face of calamity. But in A.D. 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum under ash and volcanic mud, was documented in two letters from Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the catastrophic eruption from a distance. In his letters, Pliny gives a detailed account of the eruption, describing how he refused to leave his mother behind despite her urging him to run and take shelter from the looming ash. He recounts the tragic death of his beloved uncle, the Roman author, naturalist and scientist Pliny the Elder, who perished in Stabiae while attempting the rescue of a friend and his family by ship. In his second letter to Roman historian and politician Tacitus, Pliny recalls a scene of utter disorder: “You could hear women lamenting, children crying, men shouting. Some were calling for parents, others for children or spouses; they could only recognize them by their voices.”
Vesuvius has erupted many times over the years, including in 1631 when a major eruption killed more than 3,000 people and rained ash as far as Istanbul. Researchers believe that Vesuvius will erupt again — but not for a few hundred years. And so the cycle continues.
If nothing we are facing together as humanity right now is novel in our history, then why does it feel as if we are unique in our struggles? Has the world really become more uncertain? Things might feel more uncertain today as negative events tend to be etched into our minds deeper than positive ones.
According to economist Ian Stewart, perceptions that we live in increasingly volatile times arise partly because we are comparing the period since the global financial crisis of 2008 to the period that preceded it. That era, from the mid-1980s to 2007, was one of sustained growth and macroeconomic stability in much of the industrialized world. There is some cultural nostalgia for the 1990s and early 2000s, which can be viewed as a form of escapism from the current unsettled world. For many of us, the familiarity of a time before the internet and social media became pervasive and technology felt like a runaway train is comforting in an increasingly digital world.
But even preceding the internet and social media, there was an unsettling relationship with information, and the power it has to shape history. Prior to the internet, the biggest invention to impact the dissemination of information in the Western world and lead to moral panic was the printing press. The Western printing press is credited to Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1440, and it quickly transformed society by standardizing language, spreading ideas and increasing literacy.
Now, when I look to history, I am most interested in the stories of people who carried on while facing the unpredictability and chaos of life.
Print was revolutionary — it introduced a new world of debate and discussion by creating the possibility of the circulation of ideas beyond borders. For all intents and purposes, it was the internet before the internet. Therefore, it also terrified people, particularly the elites. The fear among elites was that “irreligious” and “rebellious” ideas and thoughts might spread among the poor if there was no control over what was printed and read.
Our modern world is obsessed with the proliferation of false and misleading information online, but early modern people also feared what we would now call “fake news.” Historian Francis Young found that the current news situation has striking parallels with mid-17th-century England. In 1642, strict government regulation and censorship of printing fell to the wayside as the War of the Three Kingdoms intensified. According to researchers at the English historical and cultural journal The Many-Headed Monster, more printed material was published in 1642 than in the entire 165 years preceding the first printing press that began operating in London in 1476.
The absence of editorial control of newsbooks and pamphlets meant that this material resembled today’s user-generated content. According to Young, “all that was required to create news was access to a printing press and the willingness of stationers (the Mark Zuckerbergs of the 17th century) to provide a platform for new printed material.” From a historical perspective, what hits home is not the evolution of these social concerns around the invention of new technology and the spread of new information, but the fact that the whole drama did indeed repeat itself.
As human knowledge expands and technology continues to develop and grow, our ability to forecast the future improves. And yet, as our knowledge of the world deepens and increases, any persisting uncertainties might appear more unsettling — because shouldn’t we know what’s going on if we can know? It’s an interesting thought experiment to consider that the news of a ship lost, completely untraced at sea, is likely to prompt greater unease now than in past centuries.
We may seek to investigate the truth of past events, but in a time of more knowing than ever, we are still somewhat unwilling to accept the reality that much is unknown and that many questions simply defy answers. Despite it all, we must ultimately accept that uncertainty is — whether we like it or not — a permanent feature of human existence. As an emotion, uncertainty can be managed and diminished, but cannot be entirely eliminated.
Fear of tomorrow
Why are we so terrified of the unknown? Why do so many of us live in fear of the future? As humans, we are afraid of change because our brains are hardwired for stability and predictability, a survival trait from our ancestors who were faced with assessing the unknown for potential threats. We collectively fear losing our sense of control in the face of uncertainty. For our entire collective sentient existence, philosophers, writers, thinkers and leaders have sought to provide comfort and meaning amid misfortune.
The philosopher Epictetus, born in modern-day Turkey around 55 A.D., said that “it is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.” This idea is one of the founding pillars of the philosophical school known as Stoicism, a school of thought that strived to give people a guide to the good life even when the world around them was troubled.
For Stoics, it isn’t the event or thing itself that causes you turmoil; it’s how you think about it. Stoicism urges us to recognize what we can and can’t control. It tells us to remember that change (and loss) are constant, and that we should not fear something that is beyond our control. And yet, we have and do inherently struggle with this in practice.
It feels like the world has changed a lot since I first wandered the streets of Edinburgh with these questions in my mind over a decade ago. I lost my dad to cancer last year, and that experience tested my outlook on uncertainty and its place in our collective history, as well as my own personal history. I now find myself liberated by the many fears I had of the unknown that consumed me as a young adult, at least in aspects of my personal life. Grief, while intensely painful and unpredictable, is an important practice in what we can control: our reactions and our ability to let go of what’s not important to recenter what is.
I used to worry about what I would now consider trivial things. What sort of job I would end up with after I finished my studies. The news cycle, and being swirled into feeling incredibly anxious about the state of things. I carefully calculated the harms of walking alone on a dimly lit street, making sure I was aware of my surroundings at all times. I didn’t own a car for years as I lacked confidence behind the wheel. In my head, I imagined fake scenarios with those ever-lurking catastrophic outcomes. For a long time, I felt safer in my own company, in my own home, as it was one of the few places where I could control my emotions and my surroundings. Like many people, I can still get caught up on many of these thoughts and feelings, but I can now let go, too. I no longer focus on what is ultimately unknown. Losing my dad has taught me that I can comfortably live with doubt, uncertainty and not knowing. Today I live in the moment, knowing that I am certain of only one thing — it will, at some point, come to an end.
The certainty within every uncertainty is that we each face decisions in how to respond, and if we will respond in accordance with our values. When all of our responses are added up, history is shaped.
When it comes down to it, we all face uncertainties alone — where we might live, what career we might have, who we might fall in love with, when we might lose a loved one. And, in the big picture, we all face uncertainties together — where the economy is headed, what technology will be developed, when natural disasters might strike, which conflicts might reshape our lives and our nations as we know them. But whether it’s war or a pandemic, our relationships or finances, no matter how challenging our lives might feel, we can still thrive.
The assurance within every uncertainty is that we each face decisions in how to respond, and if we will respond in accordance with our values. When each of our individual responses is added up, history is shaped. How we navigate the world around us, how we show up for others — particularly those in need — creates certainty where it can exist. This includes coming to terms with our responsibility to our collective future history through our own actions right now.
When I started my career as a historian, I sought solid answers to fundamental questions about humanity, such as the origins of ideas, the meaning of life and the nature of progress. Today I feel more comfortable in the knowledge that none of us really knows the vast majority of what happened in the past, or what is going to happen in the future.
Humans are complex and messy, and so is history. While we might not be able to individually resolve geopolitical issues or determine the endpoint of artificial intelligence, we can collectively make a difference in society by living authentically and aligning our decisions and actions with our personal core morals, ethics and beliefs. After spending years in the archives studying the ordinary lives of people from hundreds of years ago, the only thing I can confidently say is that uncertainty is a natural part of human existence. It is not a feeling to be feared or avoided. It is a feeling felt by our ancestors and one that will be felt by future generations for centuries to come. And that’s OK.
So now, when I walk through the streets of Edinburgh, I now imagine all of us as future inhabitants of a bygone era that carried on with their daily lives — with courage and compassion — in the face of uncertainty.
This story appears in the December 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.