It began with me telling Google to set the alarm at 5 a.m.
Not because I wanted to wake up at 5, but because the internet had convinced me that civilization might collapse under a layer of snow before sunrise.
The news was dramatic. Social media was worse. People were posting warnings like public service announcements from the end of the world: Stay home. Don’t drive. It’s dangerous out there. Photos of white roads from entirely different parts of the country were shared as if snow had intentions and was actively heading toward us.
I decided to be responsible. Prepared. Virtuous.
“Set the alarm at five,” I told Google, imagining myself calmly ahead of the storm, sipping coffee while the rest of the world slid helplessly into chaos.
At 5 a.m., Google did her job. I did not.
I opened one eye, felt exhaustion in my bones, and immediately began renegotiating reality.
“Set the alarm again in 20 minutes,” I said — because clearly, if the situation were truly critical, I would feel more urgency in my soul.
Lying there, half awake, I began gathering evidence. Google Maps showed no traffic. None. Not a single red line. The roads looked innocent. Peaceful. Almost smug. Outside, it was quiet. No howling wind. No dramatic snowflakes attacking the window. Just darkness and my blanket, doing an excellent job convincing me that danger was theoretical.
This is the moment where the mind becomes very clever.
The forecast said one thing. My body said another. Social media screamed catastrophe. Google Maps whispered reassurance. I trusted all of it, none of it, and rearranged it until it supported what I already wanted: twenty more minutes of sleep.
By the time the second alarm rang, I had reached a conclusion that felt deeply rational and was based on absolutely no certainty whatsoever. I got up, got dressed, and went to work — armed with expectations, probabilities, habits, and hope, but not a single guaranteed fact about what awaited me outside.
Without realizing it, I had just performed a perfect demonstration of a philosophical problem identified centuries ago by David Hume: that human beings must act in a world where certainty is almost never available.
By the time I stepped outside, the world still hadn’t made up its mind. There was snow, yes — but not the cinematic disaster promised by the headlines. The road was passable. The air was cold but calm. Nothing screamed inevitability. Nothing confirmed catastrophe. And yet, nothing disproved it either.
This is the uncomfortable space we live in every day: acting without guarantees.
We like to believe we are guided by solid knowledge, but most of the time we are guided by something far messier — expectations shaped by past experience, amplified by warnings, adjusted by convenience, and finally sealed by habit. We trust forecasts, maps, routines, and instincts, not because they are certain, but because they usually work well enough.
This quiet gap between what we know and what we expect was identified long before weather apps and social media alerts. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that all human knowledge falls into two categories — and that realizing this changes everything.
According to Hume, there are relations of ideas and matters of fact — and nothing else.
Relations of ideas are comforting. They are neat, reliable, and immune to snowstorms. Mathematics, logic, definitions — truths that hold regardless of what happens outside. Two plus two will remain four even if the roads freeze over and the forecast collapses. These truths are certain, but they describe no actual weather, no traffic, no risk.
Matters of fact, on the other hand, are where life happens. Weather forecasts, road conditions, alarms set too early, and decisions made while half asleep all belong here. These truths are learned through experience and observation, and they always carry uncertainty. The storm may arrive. Or it may not. The road may be dangerous. Or surprisingly clear.
Crucially, their opposite is always possible.
The unsettling part is this: almost everything that matters to us belongs to matters of fact. Science. Daily routines. Trust in technology. Even the assumption that tomorrow will resemble today. None of it is logically guaranteed. We believe it because it has worked before — not because it must work again.
This is why my morning negotiation with Google felt so reasonable. I wasn’t being irrational. I was being human. I weighed probabilities, interpreted signs, trusted patterns, and acted — exactly as Hume said we do. Not guided by certainty, but by habit.
And yet, we rarely notice this. We move through life as if expectations were facts, as if repetition created necessity, as if enough warnings could turn uncertainty into truth. We confuse confidence with certainty and probability with proof.
Hume doesn’t tell us to stop trusting forecasts, science, or experience. He tells us something far more uncomfortable: that reason alone never gives us certainty about the world, and that much of what we call knowledge is really well-trained expectation.
Which may explain why a snowstorm can feel inevitable at night — and negotiable in the morning.
When I came home, I was freezing. No forecast had prepared me for that. In the end, experience corrected what expectation could only guess. And that may be the quiet lesson Hume leaves us with: we do not move through the world guided by certainty, but by habit, probability, and hope — adjusting only after reality speaks back. Reason helps us plan, experience teaches us limits, and between the two we live, act, and sometimes misjudge. Certainty is rare, but humility is available. And in a world that constantly promises us more confidence than it can deliver, that humility may be the most honest form of knowledge we have.
References (APA)
Hume, D. (1748/2000). An enquiry concerning human understanding (T. L. Beauchamp, Ed.). Oxford University Press.
Hume, D. (1739–1740/2007). A treatise of human nature (D. F. Norton & M. J. Norton, Eds.). Oxford University Press.
Kant, I. (1783/2004). Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that will be able to present itself as a science (G. Hatfield, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Popper, K. R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson.
