on agnosticism and the limits of certainty
doubt, belief, neuroscience, and how cynicism can become its own form of dogma
When a friend asked if I wanted to join a camping trip about a month ago, I immediately said yes. Didn’t ask where we were going. Didn’t ask who was going, what we needed to buy, whether there were bathrooms, how we were getting there. I just assumed we’d figure it out.
Which, honestly, is kind of how I approach most things in life.
Despite enjoying the luxuries of living in a big city with all its posh and glam, I’m actually pretty simple. I can pee on the roadside if desperate. Portable potties don’t gross me out that much. I’m resourceful enough to survive a few days without perfect conditions, exact tools, running water, or infrastructure.
My parents grew up with very little infrastructural privilege. My dad spent part of his childhood in rural Myanmar near the jungle, so despite putting me into hobbies like ballet and figure skating where all the wealthy kids hung around, they also raised me with a certain amount of grit and adaptability.
I’ve never been especially attached to material things. As long as I have a functioning brain and enough emotional resilience to not completely collapse, I generally trust that I’ll figure things out.
On the last night of the trip, we were all sitting around the campfire smelling vaguely like smoke and dirt, staring into flames the way human beings have apparently always done when trying to make sense of existence. Somehow the conversation drifted into spirituality and faith. Agnosticism versus absurdism versus nihilism. God. Meaning. Human suffering. Consciousness.
The light topics.
Despite my mother being raised with Buddhist traditions and my father claiming he was raised Catholic, my parents never really raised me and my brother with religion. Whenever I asked why growing up, I never got a clear answer.
Part of me envied the kids who went to church on weekends and had built-in communities through fellowships and youth groups. My parents were loving in many ways, but also extremely protective and honestly kind of strange about socialization. I wasn’t really allowed to go to friends’ houses much. Sleepovers were basically nonexistent. Fun was heavily supervised. I was either doing extracurriculars or spending time with relatives.
Honestly, no wonder I didn’t realize I was extroverted until much later in life.
Once I started making my own money in high school and traveling around the city independently, I began exploring spirituality on my own. My parents were no longer monitoring my every movement like I was an endangered species. I wandered into Kadampa meditation centers, Unitarian Universalist gatherings, philosophy lectures, and comparative religion classes.
Sometimes I went because I was philosophically curious. Other times because I was struggling internally and wanted relief from my own mind. I became fascinated by the possibility that human beings across cultures had developed entirely different frameworks for making sense of suffering, morality, consciousness, grief, transcendence, and meaning.
I think I was less interested in religion itself and more interested in freedom from suffering.
In college, I took classes on death and immortality and comparative religion. I wanted frameworks. I wanted context. I wanted to understand why billions of people across centuries developed entirely different systems for explaining grief, morality, transcendence, consciousness, meaning.
And honestly, the more I learned, the less interested I became in certainty itself.
Given my travels and exposure to so many ways of living and believing, I could no longer reduce faith into one singular truth. Every culture seemed to hold some fragment of wisdom. Some pattern recognition. Some way of metabolizing suffering and uncertainty. The more perspectives I encountered, the harder it became to believe any single framework could fully contain reality.
Perhaps that’s also why I ended up studying neuroscience.
At some point I realized that regardless of religion, every human being shares one thing in common: embodiment. We all experience belief physiologically. Hope. Fear. Certainty. Grief. Desire. Joy. Ambition. Faith. Loss. Love.
Neuroscience gave me concrete evidence that something physical is happening inside us when humans pray, believe, emotionally attach, meditate, grieve, or hope. Heart rates shift. Neurotransmitters fluctuate. Stress hormones surge. Neural pathways strengthen. Something is happening in the body.
The source of belief itself, however, remains kind of mysterious.
It becomes this strange chicken-and-egg question. What can consciousness will into existence? What is simply pattern recognition? What is mind over matter? What are we actively shaping versus merely responding to?
And perhaps more importantly, how much agency do we really have?
Because I’ve realized language matters a lot. Things don’t simply happen to us. Things happen, and then we interpret them, respond to them, make meaning from them. One framing removes agency entirely. The other leaves room for participation.
The organizer of the camping trip has spent years bringing people together, curating experiences, organizing adventures. It was honestly inspiring to watch. He seemed to have this almost childlike joy about connection itself. Endless energy for introducing people, facilitating conversations, helping people experience awe together.
And it made me reflect on myself.
Because although I call myself a community builder too, lately I’ve felt emotionally burnt out. Especially after the past year and all the changes, heartbreak, tension, uncertainty. I still deeply believe in the goodness of people and the power of connection, but I’ve become much more discerning with where my energy goes.
Sometimes I worry that discernment slowly calcifies into cynicism if you’re not careful.
Instead of pouring myself into everything and everyone that piques my interest, I’ve been trying to zoom out from things that feel petty and zoom in on what actually matters.
Of course, I’m still human. I still catch myself ruminating if someone treats me badly. Still get pulled into unnecessary dynamics sometimes. Someone has a falling out with another friend. Someone says something careless. Someone has a bad day and projects it onto everyone else.
My nervous system still grabs onto things.
But I think something shifted in me recently.
I used to think it was “bad” to feel angry, hurt, annoyed, disappointed. Like emotional pain itself was some sort of spiritual or psychological failure. I think part of me believed that if I became wise enough, self-aware enough, healed enough, I could somehow transcend suffering altogether.
Now I understand those reactions are often healthy.
If someone ruins something you spent weeks building, of course you’ll feel upset. If a friend puts words in your mouth, disappointment is normal. If your boss tears apart a strategy you spent days carefully crafting, frustration makes sense.
The emotion itself is not the problem.
What matters is what you make of it, what you choose to do with it.
Do you stew in it endlessly? Externalize blame forever? Stay trapped in resentment? Or do you eventually take ownership over your role, your reactions, your next choices?
I’ve realized lately that the people perpetually stuck in victimhood and unable to recognize their own agency are not really where I want to spend most of my emotional energy anymore.
And honestly, that realization confuses me a little.
What happened to the version of me who wanted to help everyone self-actualize?
Maybe people need to reach their own inflection point before they’re actually ready to change. Maybe awareness cannot be forced externally. Maybe transformation requires a level of willingness that only arrives through lived experience and suffering.
What makes someone become self-aware? What makes someone seek healing? What makes someone hold themselves accountable?
I still want to believe everyone has potential for goodness and transformation.
But I no longer feel responsible for dragging everyone there myself.
I don’t believe in pure fate or determinism because it removes agency. Removes effort. Removes responsibility.
But I also don’t believe life is entirely random either.
I think there are patterns. Physical laws. Cause and effect. But also uncertainty. Emergence. Things we still cannot fully explain.
The older I get, the more I think rigid certainty of any kind eventually becomes a form of dogma.
Which is probably why agnosticism feels closest to home for me.
I don’t claim certainty about anything.
I don’t know whether there is a God. But I also don’t know there isn’t one.
And if I could simply choose belief, perhaps I would. But my brain doesn’t work like that. I’ve never been able to force myself to believe something simply because I want comfort from it.
At the same time, I’ve also become more open lately to the possibility that there are forms of wisdom modern systems still cannot fully measure.
Science only captures what human beings currently possess the tools to quantify. That doesn’t mean other phenomena are not real.
The New York Times recently published reporting on the interstitium, essentially a newly understood fluid network in the body that some researchers believe may help explain overlaps between Eastern and Western medicine. Acupuncture has existed for centuries. Traditional Chinese medicine has existed for centuries. Entire civilizations observed patterns in the body long before MRI machines existed.
I’ve always believed acupuncture works.
Placebos work too. I almost worked for Ted Kaptchuk, who studies how belief itself alters physiology. Fascinating stuff.
Human beings saw patterns in stars and created meaning from them long before modern science could mathematically explain celestial movement.
Perhaps metaphysics is simply the category of things we have not yet developed sophisticated enough tools to measure.
Lately I’ve worried sometimes that I’m becoming too cynical. Too quick to assume the worst in people.
And then I remember periods of my life when I was emerging from some of my darkest places, and how other people’s softness, optimism, and faith in goodness helped pull me back toward myself.
I think cynical people are often just as naive as blindly optimistic ones.
Both are trying to escape uncertainty through certainty.
One insists everything will work out. The other insists nothing meaningful ever does. Both are overly certain about realities none of us can fully know.
Cynicism, I’ve realized, can become its own form of dogma. A rigid certainty that people are selfish, that hope is naive, that disappointment is inevitable.
But certainty itself is often the illusion.
True wisdom, I think, requires the ability to hold multiple truths simultaneously. To recognize goodness and selfishness, beauty and suffering, absurdity and meaning, all existing together at once.
And maybe that is my agnosticism.
The only thing I feel increasingly certain about is how little certainty human beings actually possess.
The spiritual part of me believes there are patterns and forces shaping things. The absurdist part of me wonders whether meaning itself is something we create. And another part of me suspects that even seemingly petty moments in our lives carry significance beyond our current understanding.
For now, I’m trying to stay grounded and optimistic within the unknown.
And I have faith that I will eventually emerge from this more cynical phase too.
Seeing the camping trip organizer move through the world with so much joy in bringing people together reminded me that I still have that in me somewhere. About two weeks ago, I also met someone who turned out to be a philanthropic advisor. He had a calm, wide-eyed idealism despite being much older.
It reminded me that cynicism is not inevitable.
Some people somehow move through the world retaining their softness, curiosity, and belief in possibility even after life has given them every reason not to.
Maybe wisdom is not certainty at all, but the ability to remain open despite uncertainty.
We go through phases. Seasons. Some people become hardened for a while. Others are softer, clearer, lighter.
And maybe one of the most beautiful things about human connection is that we can lean on each other across those different phases. Borrow perspective from those who have already walked certain roads. Learn from those less burdened. Or from people who were burdened and somehow emerged anyway.
Isn’t it beautiful, this messy thing called life?
Coddiwompling.