The Certainty of Uncertainty

Nathan Fielder's show, The Rehearsal, is about eliminating uncertainty from the future by simulating major life events. However, despite extreme efforts, he ultimately fails because uncertainty is a part of life. The simulations with Cor, Patrick, and Angela all fail because they lack real-life feelings and experiences. Nathan becomes obsessed with rehearsing, but realizes that his assumptions are flawed. He accepts the reality of uncertainty and finds happiness. Simulating events cannot eliminate uncertainty, and overanalyzing behavior doesn't determine others' reactions. Embracing uncertainty can reduce stress. Welcome back to the Just Our Opinion Podcast. My name is Michael, and we have three guests on the podcast today. My name is August. I'm Leon. And my name is Bill. Today, we are going to be analyzing Nathan Fielder's efforts to essentially stimulate sincere feelings and eliminate uncertainty from the future. Imagine that before any stressful or important social situation, he could rehearse that moment in a near perfect simulation, thereby eliminating much of the uncertainty regarding your future. That sounds pretty nice. It does. That's what Nathan Fielder's show The Rehearsal is all about. Maybe it's easiest to choose a path when you can live the future first. To free yourself from doubt and regret. To always know the answers. This is a quote from The Rehearsal. In the show, Nathan goes to very extreme lengths to create a lab of rehearsals to help people rehearse major life events that they are not be faced with so that they can eliminate all of their uncertainty for that situation. However, despite the extreme lengths that Nathan goes to in order to eliminate uncertainty, he still ultimately fails because of the fact that uncertainty is an inevitable part of life. To start out, we're going to talk about episode one, where Nathan helps his first client, Cor. Cor, basically, he needs help disclosing to his friend that the entire education story that he told her is fake. He told her that he had a master's degree, but he did not, and he needs help simulating the conversation about how this wasn't true. But Nathan basically went to extreme lengths to make sure every single aspect of the situation was perfect, such as creating an entire replica of the fake bar that he was going to have a decision in, and making sure every little detail of this is perfect, including, like, the angle that the sign on the wall was tilted. Yeah, he basically, he basically just tried to recreate the situation that Cor is going to be in so that he can, like, live it before he actually has to do it. And physically, everything is perfect. Yeah, he even hires a lot of actors to play all of the co-workers, or the workers of the bar, and all of, like, the other customers in the background, and he even has fake karaoke going on during, or not karaoke, trivia going on during their rehearsals. Yeah, he also makes a decision-making diagram so that Cor could follow it almost like it's, like, dialogue options in a game, but ultimately, he still fails. Yeah, despite everything, with every detail of the bar being to the perfect specifications, it still fails because he didn't, he wasn't able to create any mistakes in his rehearsal. When Cor is practicing, he didn't feel any anxiety for the situation, because if the rehearsal went bad, then they just start over and try again from a new angle. But then when he finally actually talks to his friend at the end of the episode, then the stakes are much higher because there's no chance to redo if anything goes wrong, so he freezes up and loses himself from the plan about it. That is the main failure with Cor. He fails to account for the fact that Cor is going to have feelings, but then by the time he gets to Patrick, he kind of realizes this, and that's something he even talks about. Let's listen. But I've recently come to realize I've been neglecting one key component of every crucial life event. Feelings. Nathan tried to learn from his mistakes that he made with Cor's rehearsal by actually trying to introduce emotions with Patrick. Nathan introduced the whole situation with the fake grandfather in order to try to accurately simulate the emotions of Patrick and the emotions that Patrick would actually have in a real-life scenario. Yeah, and Patrick does end up developing familial feelings for his grandfather, even though he's just an actor. But honestly, I think this whole scenario only further proves the point that Nathan failed to truly incorporate real-life feelings, because by the end of the episode, Patrick leaves. He leaves the show, and now we as the viewers are left uncertain, and Nathan's left uncertain as well, and although there was this really touching moment between Patrick and the actor who played his brother, there was also this sense of unease as if the show was telling us, like, this can't happen in the real world, and it won't happen. I think Nathan's largest failure in the show with his simulations had to be the parenthood rehearsal with Angela. Similar to Cor, her rehearsal also ultimately failed because she didn't feel strongly enough during it. Angela is a woman who always wanted to have children, but didn't know what it would actually feel like with the children, and she wanted to realize what it would be like to actually be a mother. So to help her with this, Nathan essentially had her take care of a child at different stages of their life over a period of several weeks. Yeah, but something that's really important about having a kid is, like, attachment, and that's just something that was completely absent for Angela, and it's pretty obvious why. Yeah, I agree. It's pretty much impossible to completely simulate the attachment and affection between a child and mother, especially in a situation like this, where due to labor laws, the child has to be swapped out every four hours. There's just no chance for a bond to develop between Angela and any of the kids. Yeah, Angela didn't actually gain any knowledge of what it was like to be a mother. She just gained the experience of what it was like to be a babysitter, honestly. Yeah, and that wasn't even the biggest problem with Angela's rehearsal. The biggest problem with Angela's rehearsal was what happens to the kids. Yeah, so basically, midway through Angela's journey of being a mother, they collectively decided that Nathan would join this civic rehearsal and be kind of a father figure. One of the children that they were parenting was named Remy, and with Remy calling Nathan dad, and them doing, like, father-son things together, Remy basically developed the idea that Nathan was his actual dad due to the fact that Remy didn't have this connection in real life. Yeah, and due to the guilt that Nathan felt, it actually created a huge shift in Nathan's tactics that he used for his rehearsals. After the situation with Remy happened, he started going back and rehearsing situations that happened in the past, and trying to figure out what went wrong so he could improve in the future. But even these efforts, like, ultimately weren't effective, and Nathan himself began to question his efforts. Yeah, the second half of the show is really just all about Nathan's struggle to actually create accurate simulations, and the fact that he was frustrated by his lack of accuracy, because it meant that he didn't know what to do during interactions, because what if his method was actually just all wrong? Yeah, at the end, Nathan, he really becomes obsessed with rehearsing, and that's based on two assumptions. The first is that he can know everything about a situation if he can just recreate it perfectly. He'll know, if he realizes the situation, he'll know what actions are correct and what actions are not. And that's just not the case. His second assumption is that the way people react is completely dependent on his behaviors, which is why I think it's so important to choose the right ones. Yeah, these two assumptions even lead him towards the end of the show to just go completely off the rails with his obsession, because since he's so convinced that every behavior that people experience in the show is a result of his actions, he starts to believe that his rehearsals have the potential to ruin entire people's lives. Just take a listen to this quote. Like with this show, if your performance isn't accurate, you could ruin someone's life. So Nathan said this to people who are trying to learn the fielder method, but even he himself, who created the method, struggled really clearly with it throughout the rehearsals. And in the end, he gets so fed up with constantly failing to create the perfect scenarios that he just kind of accepts the reality he's in, which is not a failed simulation. And, you know, I think personally he's happier that way, living and accepting the uncertainty in life. So as you can see from our discussion, the rehearsals that Nathan facilitated were not worth it in the long run, as you cannot eliminate uncertainty by simulating events. And just in general, in real life, you can't overanalyze every aspect of yourself and of your behavior, because ultimately what you do isn't what determines other people's reactions. So there's always going to be uncertainty. And I think for me personally, uncertainty in life actually helps me to not become stressed or anxious, which is kind of a weird term for most people, but I just think that there's no point in worrying about things you can't really control. Yeah, I think that's a good outlook. And I think Nathan ultimately proves in his show that the pursuit of getting rid of all uncertainty from your life just ultimately causes a lot more stress than just living through that uncertainty. Okay, that's all for today. Thank you guys for listening to this episode of our podcast, and stay tuned for our next episode. If you haven't already, make sure to watch the rehearsal and see what you think. See you next time. My name is Michael. I'm Leo. I'm August. And I'm Noah. And remember, this is just our opinion. Have a good one, everybody.