Doubting it

Leaning into uncertain times

Jun 23, 2025

Key concepts discussed in this essay:

The role of doubt in imagination
Differentiating philosophical doubt from ordinary doubt
Philosophical doubt as an instrument in modern times

“Am I so dependent on the body and the senses that without these I cannot exist?”, writes Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy1. “I am so greatly disconcerted as to be unable to either plant my feet firmly on the bottom or sustain myself by swimming on the surface.”

And with this immaculate metaphor, Descartes describes a provocative, deeply irritating malaise that accompanies the mental life: Doubt.

Doubt is a pressure unlike any other – and a particularly human one at that. I admit, I can’t be so sure that the birds that sing outside my window as I write this, or the neighbour’s cat gazing at them lustfully, don’t feel doubt from time to time… But I doubt it.

My first truly aware encounter with existential doubt was about five years ago, when reality was markedly different. This was before most of us could imagine a global lockdown or the extraordinary rise of artificial intelligence.

Back then, work was a place I went to, where I had my own desk with a small corner dedicated to a selection of my favourite teas and powdered soup. Underneath my desk lived a pair of high-heeled office pumps which I swapped into from my walking sneakers.

I could be certain on most mornings that the emails I was reading were authored by human beings, to whom I would carefully craft replies, ensuring the right tone, grammar and spelling to convey just the right kind of friendly competence.

I could be certain that lunch was anytime between 12 to 1. And that I would meet roughly the same colleagues in the lunchroom. We would discuss the same rotation of topics: work, the weather, what we did or were planning to do over the weekend.

I often skipped breakfast and ate the same lunch every day. Pesto chicken with broccoli. Carbs were reserved for dinner, always a bowl of fruit and a piece of chocolate.

I did not see my body as a temple but a beast whose insatiable hunger I had to control, so that its curves hugged its bones, in line with my ideal aesthetic.

Barring special occasions, I drank red wine once a week, and only on Fridays after work with colleagues.

I took my family for granted and saw my friends as social obligations.

I attracted mentors who guided me through undulating corporate rites of passage, whose support I could always count on.

Amongst all this, I was young, beautiful, aspirational, with a strong sense of identity.

Until one morning…

I was driving a work car to a wastewater treatment plant, as part of a planned site visit, and waiting at the traffic lights when I saw Her.

She was inside an empty studio, looking out through the glass window. She couldn’t be younger than forty (I was thirty-three at the time). She was sipping something out of a mug, looking contemplatively in my direction. There was an ease about her. Where everyone always seemed to be on the move, from one thing to the next, she stood still, like she was exactly where she was meant to be, and she knew it. And it made me angry to my core.

What gave her the right to be so sure of herself when life for the rest of us meant struggle and survival? To me, the only human worth their salt was the one who kept aspiring beyond themselves. Yet, she was so centred inside her body, in all its voluptuousness, that she appeared to envelope everything around her. The pedestrians who scrambled across the road, the birds that flitted by, the customers that hurried in and out of the shops, the cars all around me waiting at the stop sign, their drivers eager to take off as soon as the lights turned green – it was as if all of us only existed because she was our silent witness, slowly sipping her chamomile tea (it couldn’t be anything else) in a peace reserved only for the ascended masters.

The lights turned green, and I turned right, driving to my destination and conducting the day’s duties. But things weren’t the same. My steel-capped boots felt a tad too heavy, such that each step was like fighting gravity. The sun was far too bright, even behind sunglasses. Driving back to the office was hairy. I missed the turn into the motorway, even though I had driven that route many times. Getting back safely to the office was a relief, but everyone and everything felt off, like I was encountering all of this for the first time, and that I was someone else who had taken residence in this body with all its stored memories.

The COVID-19 lockdown followed days later. And five years thence, here we are; in a world few of us would have imagined, facing a future few of us should take for granted.

Doubt is the evil twin of Imagination, split from a paradoxical union that reintegrates through creative action. When we imagine something unimaginable, doubt is the first responder. However, doubt never kills imagination but amplifies it. In the circuit of creation, imagination is the positive anode, and doubt is the negative cathode. Every artefact that exists today was once trapped inside a nucleus of doubt before it was imagined into material reality.

Unfortunately, the modern, educated mind has been trained from an early age to treat doubt with suspicion. Our logical pattern-seeking processes seek comfort in repetition, and anything that breaks the pattern manifests as doubt, which we abolish with fixed, predictable systems, values and beliefs.

I’ve previously addressed how 20th-century structuralism has moulded human beings into little more than economic units with an intrinsic value linked to our accumulated skills and purchasing power. Those of us with unequal access to opportunities, because of our class, race, sexuality, gender or disability, feel the implications more acutely; but eventually the reality of a flawed system catches up to everyone who feels suddenly cast out due to old age or other uncontrollable shifts that reduce our ability to contribute. Almost all of us, at some point, will find ourselves ejected from the structures that once provided us with the security we assumed would always exist as long as we played by the rules.

Now I’m not advocating for our constructs to go easy on us. After all, we are the culmination of a hardy lineage that survived nature’s inconsistencies by banding together into societies that, even in their dysfunctionality, beat living in the wild by a long shot. But just as Nature sets harsh but fair rules on what she seeks through evolution, it pays to analyse what qualities our societal structures are selecting for.

Descartes’ enquiry in his Meditations, just like my own, triggered that morning at the traffic lights, is a private, jarring encounter with Doubt. With a capital D.

Such Doubt is also known in technical jargon as philosophical doubt, which differs from ordinary doubt. Peter Cole, in his excellent primer on epistemology,2 defines philosophical doubt as:

“a methodological tool where foundational knowledge is rigorously contested and clarified
brings to light any hidden assumptions
promises establishment of a firmer basis of knowledge
encourages critical thought
prevents taken for granted assumptions
checks passions and prejudices
challenges dogmatism
stops the learned getting proud
reminds us that facts are theory-laden
promotes consideration of alternative explanations and ideas”

In a nutshell, philosophical doubt is “an exercise in doubting things around you that you otherwise wouldn’t”.

To complete the comparison, ordinary doubt, also called ‘mitigated scepticism’, arises from:

“a lack of evidence (empirical)
distrust in one’s reasoning (mathematical/logical)
deficiency of skill/expertise, which requires specialised knowledge to judge or produce evidence.”

One must learn to differentiate the two types. Where the rationalising processes of the logical mind can mitigate ordinary doubt, the same processes can expand philosophical doubt into an existential crisis.

Philosopher Davide Hume suggested that philosophical doubt is best left “in the philosophy room and ignored for the rest of life” because it opens everything to questioning. However, if used wisely, I suggest there is a place for it, especially in the coming years. The 21st-century human could greatly benefit from learning to utilise philosophical doubt, especially in breaking down 20th-century dogma that, if unchallenged, could hinder our ability to address genuine existential uncertainty.

Descartes demonstrated the skill of using philosophical doubt as a flashlight into the edges of reality where the brute force of empirical reasoning cannot reach. “Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived,” he declared triumphantly after a series of doubtful convolutions, his revelation seemingly pulling him out of a severe bout of melancholy.

My experience of Doubt, which began the sequential upending of every carefully curated belief about myself, was one of liberation from a comfortably atrophied, severely outdated worldview that kept reinforcing itself. And it took a certain kink in the road to see that the egoic ‘I am’ is but a nebulous, ever-changing response to the Truth that we call material reality, whose paths we all individually control and therefore are collectively controlled by. We are the individual drops that make up life’s shifting seas, and our individual choices collectively frame reality for all of us.

Therefore, how we frame our experiences to each other matters. Responding to a ‘Hey, how are you?’ with a ‘Great, thank you’ instead of ‘Ugh, I’m so busy’ is all it takes to shift the energy of an interaction. I was one of those people, constantly bemoaning how ‘life could be better’ – a learned response within a collective attitude that labelled martyrdom as virtue and gratitude as a privilege one had to earn. That life was a rope that needed to be held tightly, otherwise everything would fall apart. But there is no gold medal for the one who suffers the most in the Olympics of life. Everyone faces their hard lessons.

Things are different for me now. When I look in the mirror, I see Her, that woman in the window, with the Mona Lisa smile and relaxed softness, content in herself and taking nothing, including the future, for granted.

These days, I let doubt guide me toward my imagination, becoming a self-contained circuit of creation. Though I still maintain a routine of two meals a day, I get to fill my plate with potatoes, drink red wine more often, and eat more than a few pieces of chocolate.

Doubt-full, I’m no longer hungry.

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