Choice
Here’s a thing about life I wish they had taught me in public school: if ya wanna get anywhere, anywhere at all, you’ve gotta bite the bullet, sweat the consequences, and make some fucking decisions.
Some will be bad. If you’re anything like me, most will be bad. You can make a lot of bad decisions and still live a pretty good life, though.
Christine sent me this TED Talk, and in it Dustin Garis explains what he discovered when he was interviewing for jobs after preparing his whole life for a fancy suit wearing career in a big business firm.
He said that during the interview process, he started asking his future employers what they did on a daily basis, and someone exclaimed that years had flown by, and then his interviewer broke down sobbing when she tried to explain a day at work and it hit her that the last ten years of her life had all blended into one infinite scrolling excel spreadsheet or something. Dustin asks how? How could ten years of your life disappear as quickly as a single day?
He decided against the job, and instead went on a journey around the world to find an answer to the question of where time goes. He spoke to strangers constantly while traveling, and an old man told him a Russian proverb, which goes
“Your life is not defined by the number of days you live, but the number of days you remember,”
and suddenly, he had the answer that his interviewer couldn’t give him.
In order to live a life you can remember, you’ve got to challenge yourself some way every day, you’ve got to live presently enough that you have to make “life and death” decisions which result in you encountering new things each day. And you’ve got to DECIDE to live that way, you’ve got to DECIDE which path you’ll take, you’ve got to live with the consequences of your decision. You can drop everything and buy a one way ticket to Tibet to become a Monk, you can throw away all of your clothes and lock yourself in a room to write one of the best novels of all time, or you can make casual but important every day decisions like trying out a new internet browser or taking the courage to ask someone out on a date.
Incidentally, Dustin was so inspired to help others realize the importance of living this way that he formed a movement around it, called “LifeProfit.” LifeProfit encourages you to do weird things just for the sake of shaking up your routine, which I think is awesome.
According to best selling author Daniel Kahneman, laziness is in our DNA. It’s a survival mechanism, an energy conservation tactic. It comes from a pre-agricultural time when our next meal wasn’t guaranteed, because we were more likely to survive if we were lazy during downtime in order to have enough energy to hunt when the opportunity arose. Though we don’t hunt to survive anymore, the laziness has survived in our genetic makeup, and so a special part of our brain tries to ensure we do as little as possible unless we have a good reason to do more.
Also according to best selling author Daniel, and lots of other scientists and authors, there are two internal processes which guide us from mostly non-existent danger as we wander about in our aimless lives today, and one does the automatic stuff like getting hungry, being lazy, flinching etc, and the other does concentrated effort stuff like math. We mostly only have voluntary control over the second process. Best selling author Dan calls them Type I and Type II processes.
Decisionmaking is a Type II thought process, which requires consideration about a lot of potentially non-instinctual choices, like whether you can realistically squeeze a fifteen minute walk each way and then a casual thirty minute salad in to your strict ten minute lunch break. Type II processes cover Exclusively-Twenty-First-Century concerns, like whether you’ve got enough budget and spare brain cells to take a quarter tab of LSD every morning for the next thirty days and journal about it, or whether you should risk ruining your relationship with your best friend by confessing your love (or continue to live a slightly miserable and unfulfilled loveless life in order to maintain the status quo).
Because we’re lazy and that sort of hyper rational decision making consumes lots of type II brain energy, we naturally avoid decision making. Before you even have the chance to make the energy consuming type II decision, you have to overcome your type I laziness which would rather you just avoided making the decision altogether, and then after you decide to make it, you have to actually make the decision itself, which is kind of like a double whammy. Lastly, you could get slammed with the consequences of making the wrong decision, and the negative feedback you get when this happens helps condition you to completely avoid decision making whenever possible.
Today for example, I had to decide whether to eat cheaper, shittier food for lunch or spend extra money for something nice, and I stood motionless in the freezing cold for at least 60 seconds because I was so hesitant to commit one way or the other.
While it’s a pretty big emotional hurdle to overcome, routinely making decisions, even if you decide wrong, actually leads to a more memorable and therefore more worthwhile life (admittedly just by my standards, although I bet if you ask people who are old and wise enough to know, they will agree.)
Like I said earlier, I wish they’d got me started making decisions at an earlier age. I think they tried to teach me about the third U.S president’s wooden teeth, but I know they never strapped me up and told me GODZILLA IS ATTACKING YOUR SMALL VILLAGE. YOU CAN EITHER SAVE YOUR FRIEND WHO BORROWS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIES AND NEVER RETURNS THEM, OR SAVE YOUR BROTHER WHO NEVER SHARES THE CANDY HE IS ABLE TO AFFORD BECAUSE OF HIS SMALL TIME DRUG DEALING BUSINESS. CHOOSE ONE, THE OTHER DIES. LIVE WITH THE CONSEQUENCES.
I did have one amazing teacher, Douglas Tsoi, who proposed some really interesting though experiments; he’s from San Francisco, which is full of hills and trolleys, and he asked us “if a trolley broke free and it was going to kill three people, and you had the choice to pull a lever to move the tracks so that the runaway trolley only killed one person, would you pull it?”
He didn’t make us actually answer the question and live with the consequences as that probably would have been too hard on us, but I suspect he was smart enough to understand the importance of where he was going with all of it.
Perhaps by suggesting the thought experiment, he was putting us in a position to actually make a decision (right or wrong) if we found ourselves in a runaway trolley situation. Perhaps by suggesting the thought experiment, he was putting us in a position to actually make a decision (right or wrong) if we found ourselves in a runaway trolley situation. If you practice doing things that are hard, they get easier. Again, you have to decide to practice, but hey, that’s the beauty of life, and that’s what makes life beautiful.
To wrap things up cleanly and nicely, the real point of all of this is that I love riding my bike in Berlin. I decide to take a new route to work as often as possible, and there are oh so many crooked, wandering, gold-paved paths through Dorothy’s woods here. I recommend it to anyone, especially those who have problems making decisions, because you need as much practice making decisions as possible, and the consequence for making the wrong decision in this case is that you embark on a unique and beautiful new bicycle journey.
If I choose to take an old route on my bike, there are new cobblestones to ride the cracks between, there are completely unpredictable and eerily heavy-footed elderly folks revving their engines ready to flatten you like frogger, and if you’re lucky enough to be flying through Kottbusser Tor you know that each and every charming citizen standing in line at the methodone truck has carefully shattered a Sterni directly where you need to cross and the gleaming glass bits are jumping over themselves to flatten your tire as well.
That’s it, thanks for reading!
***
Some conspiratorial part of me thinks that maybe they don’t teach you to make decisions when you’re a kid because they don’t really want you to make decisions. Decision making can be dangerous, it puts power in the hands of the decider. Ideally, to function as predictably as you can in society, you actually need to make as few decisions as possible, because that’s easiest for whoever is in charge to understand. The term in statistics for a human decision is “stochastic,” which means random, i.e, something that can’t effectively be predicted.
Originally published at dazedandconfused.club on February 12, 2017.
