Believe Everything But Don’t Believe in Anything

I believe love is just chemistry and evolutionary programming and I believe it’s the most real thing we experience. I believe the universe is meaningless matter following physical laws and I believe my choices matter profoundly.

In a recent podcast interview with my longtime friend and colleague Jeremy Sirota I told him, “I like to say I don’t believe anything. I don’t believe in anything because I think as soon as you start to believe something, you dismiss everything else, you start to shut yourself off from possibility. But I also have this competing impulse, which is I’ll believe everything. Could you levitate right now? Maybe so. I don’t believe it, but I believe it’s possible, and that realm is so important to me.”

This way of thinking serves me better than certainty ever did. Younger Me would have picked a side on these contradictions and defended it. Now I’d rather hold both at once and let them talk to each other.

Science will explain everything someday. Also: some mysteries may never resolve, no matter how much we learn. Individual responsibility matters and most of our behavior is shaped by forces we didn’t choose. We borrow our deepest thoughts from people we’ve never met, then call them our own.

I used to think holding contradictions meant being wishy-washy or indecisive. It doesn’t. It requires more strength than certainty does. Certainty provides comfort but shuts down learning. When you believe something completely, you stop looking for evidence that might change your mind.

This shows up everywhere in my work. Creative projects go best when you hold contradictory impulses simultaneously — unwavering vision and total flexibility, caring deeply about the outcome while staying unattached to how it unfolds. The best work I’ve done came when I was sure it would be both great and a disaster.

I’ve seen the same thing in relationships. The person in front of you is exactly who they seem and completely different from what you see. Your partner is unchanged and unrecognizable from who they were five years ago. Both.

None of this is a recipe for paralysis. The real move is asking: what if both are true? When someone asks if I think their creative project will succeed, I don’t pick between optimism and realism. I tell them I believe it will succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and that they should prepare for multiple failures along the way.

You stop defending your position and start looking for what you might be missing. Opposing views become interesting rather than threatening. You’re after information that changes you, not confirmation that you were already right.

Could your gut feelings be picking up signals you can’t articulate yet? Could consciousness survive the body? I don’t know. But I won’t close those possibilities off by committing to no. That realm of ‘maybe’ keeps me curious.

I’m not arguing for relativism, or that all ideas are equally valid. Some contradictions resolve with more information. Others are genuine paradoxes, as in you don’t resolve them, you learn to hold them. The work is knowing which is which.

I’m less interested in what someone believes than in how tightly they hold it. Someone who believes their parenting approach is definitively correct but can’t consider other methods has the same problem as someone who dismisses all parenting advice completely. Both have closed off learning.

Belief closes off possibilities. So does disbelief, just from the other direction. The only thing that keeps the door open is the willingness to say: “I don’t know, but maybe.”