The Laziest Answers

I don't mean lazy in the sense of requiring no effort to believe. People put enormous effort into their beliefs. I mean lazy in the sense of doing no explanatory work. They're placeholder answers. You could swap in almost anything, simulation theory, cosmic turtles, dream of Brahma, and it would explain exactly as much, which is to say nothing.

Ask someone how consciousness works and they might say God designed it. But this explains nothing about how consciousness actually works. It's just a way of saying “I don't know” while feeling like you do. The question remains exactly where it was; you've just given it a label.

Aliens do the same work. Don't understand how life began or how the Pyramids were built? Aliens did it. You haven't answered the question. You've just moved it to another planet. Now you have to explain how that life began. You've added a step without gaining any ground.

What makes these answers so appealing isn't that they're good. It's that they're available. They're always ready, infinitely flexible, and they fit any hole. That's not a sign of explanatory power. It's a sign of explanatory emptiness. A theory that can explain anything explains nothing.

But here's the strange part: this doesn't seem to bother people much. Which suggests the answers aren't really doing the work we think they're doing. They're not satisfying curiosity. They're satisfying something else.

I think what they're satisfying is our discomfort with uncertainty.

One of the strangest things about humans is how allergic we are to “I don't know.” If you ask someone what happens after death, they'll often give you an answer. Not a shrug, an actual answer, delivered with the confidence of someone giving you directions to the airport. Same with questions about how the universe began, whether there's other intelligence out there, or what the purpose of existence is. These are some of the hardest questions imaginable, and yet answers come readily.

Why? What makes uncertainty so unbearable that we'll accept almost any explanation over none?

I think “I don't know” has a cost that many people find intolerable. It leaves a hole. And holes in our understanding of fundamental things feel dangerous, even if they're not. So we fill them. With gods, with aliens, with whatever conceptual furniture we have lying around. The quality of the answer matters less than having one.

This might not matter if it only affected dinner party conversation. But beliefs have a nasty tendency to become part of identity. Once that happens, they're no longer hypotheses you hold but things that hold you. And you can no longer think clearly about them. Try questioning someone's religious beliefs, or their conviction that we've been visited by extraterrestrials, and watch what happens. You're not challenging an idea. You're challenging who they are.

Here's a useful test: Would your life be any different if this belief were false? I don't mean emotionally different. I mean practically different. Would the sun behave differently tomorrow? Would your chair stop supporting your weight? Would water stop being wet?

For most beliefs about the supernatural, the answer is no. The universe would continue operating exactly as it does now. Which raises a question: If a belief has zero predictive power and zero practical consequence, what exactly is it doing for you?

What it's doing, I think, is providing comfort. Which isn't nothing. Comfort matters. But we should at least be honest about the transaction. You're trading epistemic accuracy for emotional reassurance. That might be a reasonable trade in some circumstances. What's unreasonable is pretending you're not making it.

The independent-minded tend to have a different relationship with uncertainty. They're not necessarily more comfortable with it, but they're more willing to tolerate the discomfort. They'd rather have an accurate map with blank spaces than a complete map that's wrong.

This isn't about being smarter. Some very intelligent people have strong religious beliefs. What seems to differ is what you might call fastidiousness about truth, a squeamishness about believing things without adequate evidence, the way some people are squeamish about eating food that might be slightly off. It's not a moral virtue. It's closer to a temperament.

People without this fastidiousness aren't stupid. They just have different priorities. For them, the social and emotional functions of belief outweigh the epistemic ones. Believing what your community believes is stabilizing. Having answers to the big questions is comforting. These are real benefits. They're just buying them at a price the fastidious aren't willing to pay.

The interesting question isn't whether God exists or aliens seeded Earth. Those questions may be unanswerable, at least for now. The interesting question is why we feel we need answers so badly that we'll accept bad ones. What is it about uncertainty that we find so threatening?

The universe doesn't care what you believe. The sun will rise tomorrow regardless of your cosmology. Gravity will keep working whether you attribute it to God's will or curved spacetime. Your beliefs are entirely for you. They're a kind of internal decoration.

Which means you could, if you wanted, simply not have them. You could hold the questions open. You could look at the mystery of existence and say “I don't know” and leave it at that. You could tolerate the hole.

Most people don't do this. The discomfort is too great. But you could. And there's something to be said for it. An honest “I don't know” is the beginning of inquiry. A premature answer is the end of it.

There's a social cost, though. People who refuse placeholder answers often get treated as cold, arrogant, or evasive. “I don't know” reads as withholding rather than honesty. You're not just tolerating internal discomfort, you're becoming a social outlier.

But here's the asymmetry that matters: people with placeholder answers stop looking. People who hold the question open occasionally stumble into real answers. The willingness to sit with uncertainty is a prerequisite for finding out. The people who eventually figure things out are usually the ones who could stand not knowing the longest.

One caution: if you make “I don't know” part of your identity, that can calcify too. The goal isn't to be the person who doesn't believe. It's to keep the question alive. The laziest answers aren't lazy because they require no effort to believe. They're lazy because they let you stop thinking. And stopping is the one thing you can't afford if you actually want to understand.