Many emotions have something to do with prediction. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us in the future, but we can imagine many possible scenarios, especially when we’ve got a lot on the line. Often, we get away with being wrong, but inaccurate predictions can have bad consequences.
When we feel unready, we measure ourselves against the challenges we expect to face, and predict that we’ll fare poorly.
Of the many unready figures in history, Ethelred the Unready is among the most infamous. He was King of England a little bit over a thousand years ago, at a time when Vikings were threatening the country. Ethelred came to the throne after his brother was assassinated. It was suspected that Ethelred had ordered the assassination himself. As a result, Ethelred suffered from distrust and conflict among the most powerful English families, and Vikings were able to take advantage of this vulnerability. After years of invasions, the king of the Danes finally forced Ethelred to hand over the English throne.
Ethelred wasn’t unready in the sense of being taken by surprise by the Vikings. Instead, he was given the mocking title Unraed, an old English word that meant he was poorly counseled rather than just poorly prepared. The bitter joke was that Ethelred’s own name itself was derived from the same source, and meant noble counsel.
The broader sense of poor counsel rather than lack of preparation may seem a subtle nuance, but it’s not completely fallen out of unraed’s modern English ancestors, including unready, read, and dread. The broader idea is that it’s not enough to merely work hard to prepare for future events. It’s important to research relevant information and to gain the advice of others. To feel unready is therefore not merely to feel unpracticed, but also to feel ignorant of the context of the challenges one faces.
How well can anyone read the future, though? There is an appeal to the idea that the future is like a book that has already been written, and can be read by those who possess the skill. Authors of fantasy and horror alike love to use prophecies as plot devices. Why must a character act in a specific way? It is written, the authors tell us.
The presence of prophecy in a storyline, however, can deprive characters of the sense of agency that makes them interesting to readers. Narratives that center around prophecies also lack the uncertainty that motivates readers to keep turning the page to find out what happens next. Prophecy feels like a trick used by a lazy writer, something that’s meant to paper over gaps in the author’s imagination. Nonetheless, prophecies can be an appealing device when they speak to the sense of doom that we all sense in our lives.
Given the confusion of life in our complex society, it’s difficult not to feel that things are supposed different than the way they are, and that we have forgotten to pay attention to something vital. In the emotion of impostor syndrome, people make public declarations of their lack of adequate preparation in order to provide themselves with both social understanding and the confidence that’s necessary for them to do an adequate job.
Feeling unready is a more direct appraisal of what we know and what can do: We don’t really know what’s going to happen next, and we haven’t obtained the kind of counsel required to face the uncertainty. We are prepared to be deposed.
