Structure & Certainty

Life is confusing and chaotic. Many people gravitate to groups or ideologies because they provide structure, rules, and clear answers. Fundamentalist movements are a prime example. They turn the grey ambiguity of life into black-and-white clarity. There’s often a strict code of conduct, a schedule, a hierarchy, a doctrine that explains everything. This structure can be incredibly reassuring. One theory, uncertainty-identity theory, suggests that when people feel uncertain about their place in the world, they’re more likely to join extreme groups that mitigate uncertainty… to gain a reassuring sense of certainty and clarity. In a militant cult, you don’t have to figure out right and wrong… It’s all laid out for you. There’s a certain relief in outsourcing your decision-making to a higher authority or a clear rulebook. Now consider the anti-group person: we don’t get an off-the-shelf rulebook. We tend to reject external structure (sometimes to our detriment). But that doesn’t mean we thrive in chaos. What I’ve noticed in myself is that I create internal structures to compensate. I won’t follow society’s schedule for when to marry or how to socialize, but I’ll develop my own consistent principles to live by. For example, I developed a very firm personal ethic around consent and boundaries (partly as a reaction to past pressures). It’s almost a private religion. I have rules like: “Never agree to something major when under peer pressure; step away and decide alone.” Or: “Any interaction, even small, must have ongoing mutual consent, or I’m out.” These rules provide structure to my relationships and choices. They might seem overly strict to others, but they give me clarity and safety. In essence, I’ve built a structure of one. In my case, when I felt adrift, I imposed structure on myself: I schedule personal projects, I set goals and milestones that matter only to me. During a time when I struggled with understanding intimacy, I embarked on a “research project” and played an adult game to better understand human sexuality. It sounds strange (and it was, in a beautifully human way), but it gave me a sense of purpose.