In my conversations with advisers, I often hear how much they dread market volatility. The idea of political turmoil, a looming recession or (even worse) an extended bear market quickly becomes the anxiety-driven theme of the discussion. These events are painful, and it is a good thing they don’t happen very often. But few advisers consider that without the fundamental uncertainty of the markets, they wouldn’t have a job.

The human brain is essentially a prediction machine. It is designed to consume information from experiences in the environment, interpret it and then use it to try to predict the future. This process evolved over millions of years to ensure humans’ survival and prosperity in a hostile ecology.

Evolution not only gave us this obsession with predicting the future; it also supplied us with a huge number of built-in mental shortcuts to help us cope with all that hostility. Behavioral scientists call them heuristics: decision-making patterns that are