How to Deal With Anxiety

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In the pre-modern world, we assume the future would perfectly resemble the present. But that removed an extraordinary amount of anxiety from people's lives. So why do we build these sophisticated methodologies about how to think about tomorrow? "I put my head in the sand and I think it's all going to be the same," he says.

We all face fork-in-the-road moments in our lives. In his 2005 bestseller “Blink,” Next Big Idea Club curator (and this episode’s guest interviewer) Malcolm Gladwell famously argued that snap judgments can be just as effective as meticulous planning. In this lively conversation, author Steven Johnson (“Farsighted”) disagrees, arguing that big, complex decisions require careful thought and scenario-building.