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How Should We Live in These Wildly Uncertain Times?
There is almost nothing as captivating as a good magic trick. Watching something that defies gravity, odds, and the basic principles of physics and mathematics happen before our very eyes gives us an infusion of awe that feels incredible. Even knowing that it is an illusion, a well-executed trick, can cause a rush of astonishment that titillates both mind and body; it is a flat-out betrayal of expectations that can raise our heart rate in anticipation and, perhaps, a little fear, yet it comes at no personal cost to our well-being.
And there is almost no one who captivates audiences with a good magic trick quite like David Blaine. Arguably the most renowned magician of his time, he can make his audience believe that it can’t be an illusion—his tricks appear as real as they are inconceivable. Blaine was four years old when he first felt the spark of awe for magic. Standing on a subway platform in Brooklyn with his mother, a nearby busker performing simple pocket magic piqued the young boy’s curiosity. A few decades later, his own spectacular skill at sleight of hand would make Blaine a household name. Card tricks performed on the street in front of a dozen or more witnesses tickled our wits, seeming to invert the rules of logic. An old-fashioned illusionist with a modern-day film crew to showcase his feats, Blaine quickly became the new face of magic.
In 1999, when he was buried alive for seven days in a plastic box, he took his game to another, Houdini-esque level: dramatic performance artist. Since that record-breaking feat, Blaine has orchestrated countless stunts, each more high risk and unimaginable than the one before it. He stood for thirty-five hours straight on a fifty-five-centimetre-wide pillar rising thirty metres in the air above Bryant Park in New York City. He spent forty-four days in self-imposed starvation inside a transparent Plexiglas case, measuring one metre by two metres by two metres, suspended nine metres in the air over the River Thames in London. He has swallowed (and regurgitated) fish, engagement rings, needles, swords, nails, and a frog. He has floated more than seven kilometres above sea level by holding fifty-two colourful helium balloons, like a live-action remake of the animated film Up.
Is it ego or something more philosophical that motivates him to undertake such dangerous and attention-grabbing stunts? Blaine is a polarizing figure and has many detractors, but no matter what you think of his inclination for the outrageous, the attitude he brings to his work strikes me as a fascinating perspective on sitting with uncertainty and the fear that is baked into it. Few people have as deep an understanding of fear as Blaine—a knowledge he has acquired by facing down those feelings of dread and carrying out a deep investigation of what they’re made of. He pushes his body and mind to the limit, and while it’s the spectacle of the needle-through-the-arm kind of physical extremes that attracts the most attention, it’s the mental attitude behind his stunts that interests me.
What would go through your mind were you to stand, as Blaine did, in March 2023, for the opening of his Las Vegas residency at the Resorts World Theatre, atop a twenty-four-metre platform and prepare to jump? The prospect of falling nine storeys onto a pile of cardboard boxes has to be uncertainty at its most acute and a good reason to be afraid. What if I don’t land on the target? What if I sever my spine and never move independently again? What if I land on my head and die? What if it hurts? What if I look like a fool and end my career?
The list of things to be afraid of in those unusual and perilously uncertain circumstances is long and, from a comfortable seat safely on the ground, somewhat nauseating to even contemplate. But those don’t seem to be Blaine’s questions as he stands poised to undertake his dangerous feats. What does he think or believe that allows him to process fear differently? In addition to being a spectacle, a marvellous distraction, a gimmicky illusionist who redefines the limits of possibility, Blaine offers an example—extreme and provocative though it may be—that it is possible to change our relationship with the unknown.
Why do we refer to death as the Great Unknown? We cannot possibly know what it will be like, and we associate the inability to prepare for and master something with a negative feeling. But isn’t this—all that we are alive for right now—in fact the Great Unknown? This hopefully long stretch of days and nights spooling out before us is utterly unpredictable and entirely outside our ability to control.
Maybe we need to reframe what we think of the unknown. Other terms in the English language used to describe whatever comes after death are rapturously positive: nirvana, paradise, the Promised Land. Following that optimistic logic, we ought to be more comfortable with the state of unknowing, on whichever side of the veil it comes. Are we perhaps more comfortable with uncertainty than we realize or give ourselves credit for?
How is the series you’re currently binge-watching going to end? What will happen to the heroine in the next episode? If you knew, there would be almost no point in watching. There are other times in our lives when we see uncertainty less as a cause for anxiety and more as a state of feeling more alive.
It’s important to remind ourselves that we all have experience with navigating, and even revelling in, the unknown.
Think of all the instances in your life where you not only handled uncertainty but actually embraced it. Where would roller coaster operators or backcountry ski tours be without the human appetite for a little risk? Travel, surprise parties, blind dates, new jobs—we throw caution to the wind and gamble with outcomes all the time. Sports betting apps have proliferated based on our insatiable appetite for the thrill of a sports match—the uncertainty of those outcomes keeps us on the edge of our seats—and the added appeal of wondering about (and gambling on) the margin of victory, the stats of individual players, and every other possible permutation of the unknowable. We might not call it uncertainty, but that’s what it is. It’s important to remind ourselves that we all have experience with navigating, and even revelling in, the unknown. So why are we afraid of some uncertainties while others bring a rush of pleasure?
If you ask a psychologist, there are five fundamental human fears, from which all other fears are shaped. Those five essential fears are extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego death. Uncertainties that seem terrifying to us—environmental disasters, computers taking over human work and creativity, political turmoil—must appear thus because they threaten our physical or psychological survival. Or so we tell ourselves.
But if you asked a writer who built a literary reputation trading on readers’ fears, you’d get another interpretation. As H. P. Lovecraft wrote in 1927: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
Lovecraft was never on my bookshelves; horror and dark fantasy don’t appeal to me. But I am fascinated by people who are fans of the genre—and why they would willingly stick both feet into the fire of fictional terror and all the gut-churning, blood-curdling, heart-pounding responses it generates.
In fact, research has suggested there may be some benefit to experiencing full-body fear from a book or a film. Brain-imaging studies have shown that watching a horror movie activates the endocrine system—the release of adrenaline and cortisol that prepares us to take physical action to escape a threat—even though we know the danger isn’t real; and for many people, that rush can lead to a boost in mood. The horror-flick high.
But beyond the relative safety of a make-believe movie that scares you, how do you feel about real fear in your real life? I know; it sounds like a stupid question. I feel fearful, silly. What I mean is, if I told you that you were going to experience fear in your life tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, how would you feel about that fact? Most of us don’t like fear. We recoil in most circumstances that cause pain or unpleasantness of any kind. We seek pleasure and positive experiences, treasure and cling to them; and conversely, we try to move through discomfort and negative emotions as quickly as possible. We are, after all, just adult versions of those one-year-olds in a Strange Situation, eager to return to the cozy embrace of the loving parent we’ve always trusted.
That’s why David Blaine intrigues me. He may appear to be a foolhardy daredevil with a death wish, but he has invested great time and effort into teaching himself how to overcome fear. Much like Lovecraft, he views fear as the response to a lack of information. “The best way to combat fear,” he told Rick Rubin on an episode of the Broken Record podcast, “is with knowledge, making a conscious effort to understand the information at hand. You don’t jump into the unknown, you do it step by step.”
In the case of his death-defying feats, the way Blaine acquires the knowledge to overcome fear is by practising. He doesn’t simply decide to stand on a thirty-metre pillar and see how it goes—it only looks that way to the viewing public. To get himself there, to mitigate his fear, he gives himself as much physical, sensory, and intellectual information as possible in advance.
We can think of fear differently, not by denying it or ignoring it, but by shifting our vantage point.
First, he prepares his body. What the audience hasn’t seen him do, but which he has discussed in interviews, is go over elements of these stunts beforehand. Blaine says he spent weeks standing on a flowerpot in the corner of his sixteenth-floor balcony ahead of his tower stand. He slept in a plastic coffin in his friend’s living room for increasingly long periods of time. He jumped from six metres, then seven, and so on, teaching himself how to land on a pile of cardboard boxes. He learned to pee in a bag. By gradually acclimating his body to the physical challenges involved in each stunt, he was able to manage what might otherwise have seemed unmanageable. The act of standing way up on a tiny pillar (or being buried alive, or sheathed in ice, or going weeks without eating) remains daring and dangerous, but Blaine has trained his body to believe his own mantra: We can handle more than we think. (He has reportedly taught his daughter to turn the water to cold for the last minute of her shower, training her to face her fears slowly, bit by bit.) In other words, we can think of fear differently, not by denying it or ignoring it, but by shifting our vantage point. Blaine rises above his fears and allows them to guide him forward.
What if you could alter your own relationship to fear? You probably don’t have plans to float over Nevada hanging from a bunch of balloons anytime soon, but our everyday uncertainties can change shape in the light of Blaine’s thinking. Instead of recoiling at the first fearful impulse, we can lean in to investigate the source of that fear—the first step in overcoming it. What aspect of this uncertainty am I afraid of? And how can I gather knowledge and information to help me understand it better? Blaine studies his fear the way he studies illusion, misdirection, and cardistry. By boring into it, he breaks it into more manageable parts, and suddenly, fear’s limiting power is somewhat neutered. Instead of succumbing to the fear unquestioningly, he chooses to reach beyond it.
My own strategy to overcome fear has been to “feel the fear and do it anyway,” as the popular saying goes. But I realize now that I have misinterpreted the mantra, focusing only on the second half: do it anyway. I have always thought that leaping into action is to fully embrace life; that being impulsive and assuming the posture of confidence is the secret. A fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to being—or at least appearing to be—fearless.
I have a long-standing love of jumping off rocks and cliffs. Not the twenty-five-metre stuff of David Blaine spectacles, of course. But a six- or even eight-metre jump into deep water is something to which I will always say (a nervous but determined) yes. A yes to experiencing seconds of free fall that are jam-packed with so much exhilaration as to feel like minutes; a hell yes to conquering the pounding heart and ripples of full-body heat telling me to back away from the rock’s edge. But I can’t listen to that fear. I need to defy it. I need to prove it wrong and show myself that it can’t defeat me, limit me, hold me back from that fleeting rush of a carefree plummet. There is nothing more powerful than that fraction of a second when I override what is surely a sensible, evolutionarily sound, protective urge to stay back from the edge—and I leap. I do it anyway. Crashing into the safe embrace of the cool water, pointed feet flapping like every baby held over a bathtub, I feel vindicated. And a little bit stronger every time it happens.
For most of my life, I operated on the principle that if I do the things that most people are afraid of, then I must be brave. Striking a devil-may-care pose of bold spunkiness, my audacity speaks for itself. See? I’m doing things that terrify me; therefore, I must be fearless and powerful. Diving in as a posture of daring. But I see things differently now; more completely. In my haste to move impulsively into the action that I feared—to do it anyway—I was racing past the first half of that boldness directive, the part that matters most: feel the fear.
Doing something courageous without reframing how we think about sitting in difficult emotions like fear, pain, and uncertainty is just a flex. Feeling the fear, getting close to it, sitting with it, identifying it, naming it, honouring it, tracing its energetic path through your body—that is the part that makes you strong. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is a two-step process, and I’ve only recently come to see how much I’ve skipped the first step.
“I believe in the idea that we can all push past what we believe is possible.”
The other, perhaps even more critical, aspect of Blaine’s training is to cultivate a confident mindset. That’s where the real magic happens—in his head. I think this is the life lesson we can all take from the radical stuntman. How has Blaine changed his mental approach to fear and discomfort? He accepts everything the way it is. “You can’t fight the force of what is happening,” he told Rubin. “Whatever feels frightening about the uncertainties we face, we know that panicking about our inability to handle it never helps. You need to have faith that you can handle it and try to stay calm.”
Using the information and knowledge he gathers through his research and practice, Blaine bolsters his faith that he can handle whatever happens. It’s a faith that drives everything he does, and a confidence he wants the rest of us to think about. “I believe in the idea that we can all push past what we believe is possible.”
On the surface, Blaine’s call to confidence might sound like an empty you-can-do-it pep rally platitude. But it is more than a bromide; his conviction that we can all handle more than we think we can is rooted in deeper thought, which, for him, stems from a profound loss. Blaine was raised by a single mother who died when he was twenty-one. “When my mother was dying, she looked at the beauty in everything. She made death very poetic and beautiful. It was the greatest gift she gave me; she made me not afraid of the unknown.”
During the several weeks he spent in isolation for his stunt “Above the Below,” those forty-four days in a glass box suspended over the Thames, David Blaine kept a journal. His notes are an account of his physical symptoms—the throbbing head, racing heartbeat, dry mouth. As his body ran out of enough energy to lift a pen, the entries dwindle to a nearly illegible chicken scratch. But before they do, he documents some of the metaphysical aspects of his experience. In spite of being the target of a lot of anti-American sentiment from Brits on the ground below, who pelted his see-through box with everything from eggs to golf balls and taunted his escalating hunger with barbecued hamburgers, the magician put that negativity in perspective. “In truth, though, none of it really gets to me too much. Just sometimes. But there has been so much peace and love here it negates all else.”
Blaine has said that he cherishes the memory of that stunt more than almost any other—when he was able to watch the sun rise and set in minute-to-minute detail. In an inspired act of choosing what to pay attention to, as his body underwent unimaginable discomfort, he journalled that this was a “discovery of how strong we all are in mind, body and spirit.”
So, how do we want to spend our days in these wildly uncertain times? Do we want to live and die in fear? Or do we want to face the evidence before us, take action to mitigate our own role in the problem, and make conscious choices about what we pay attention to along the way?
Excerpted from A Love Affair with the Unknown: Leaning into the Uncertainty of Modern Life by Gillian Deacon, 2026, published by House of Anansi. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
The post How Should We Live in These Wildly Uncertain Times? first appeared on The Walrus.
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