On Decisions
What to do and what not to do?
The word decision comes from the Latin dēcīdere which is the infinitive of the word dēcīdō which means “to cut off” or “to die”. In a sense, then, what the etymology of the word implies is that making a decision is to kill all other possibilities.
This is probably what sometimes makes us indecisive: our inability to kill the other choices. Before the decision is made an entire world of possibilities is open to us. But as soon as the decision is made, we are stuck with the one choice, out of many, that we made.
A simple example is when I am deciding to order-in food. When I open the food-ordering app, I am flooded with choices of a variety of cuisines and multiple restaurants offering those cuisines. When I decide I want to eat Italian food, for example, I can no longer entertain thoughts of cuisines from the rest of the world. When I pick a particular Italian restaurant, I can longer entertain thoughts of the other Italian restaurants. And then, picking the meal itself from a large menu does the same thing: the final nail in the coffin of all other choices.
This is probably why me and wife find a weekly meal plan so reassuring. In a moment, over the weekend, we go through the tough process of selecting the meals for the rest of the week, relieving ourselves from the responsibility, and the associated anxiety, of making a choice, and effectively murdering other choices, every day of the week. I found it to be such an effective antidote for reducing the existential dread stemming from murdering choices every day, that when I was living alone, I made the selection for a longer period: a fixed meal plan for each day of the week that repeated ad infinitum. Or at least until I went out of my way to swap Chinese Thursdays with Thai Thursdays. The alliteration alone made a strong case, after all!
While we make hundreds of decisions every day, murdering alternatives willy-nilly, we are mostly able to forge on and not get stuck with indecision. This is at least the case, as in the example above, when the decision is what stands between a grumbling stomach and its salvation. With decisions like the one to be made about what to eat, we are also acutely aware that we will be hungry again and there will be a chance to go back to the other choices soon enough. In that sense, the death of those alternatives is only momentary. They have a self-healing, or self-renewing, superpower of sorts as they will be born again the next time we are hungry.
But in many other facets of life, which are arguably more life-altering, making a decision, choosing one out of the many available choices, can feel daunting and even paralysing. In decisions about hairstyle, car, house, job, career or life partner, the choices don’t have the same degree of healing or self-renewing prowess. A decision on these matters results in a much longer death of the alternatives. We are stuck with a hairstyle choice for weeks or even months. It’s two to ten years with the choice of a car and much longer with a career choice. The most extreme case is when we select a partner. In some cultures, we vow to die before the choices can self-renew when we say, ‘till death do us part’. In other cultures, we vow to be together for seven (or all) lifetimes, believing that while we will be reborn, the choices won’t be allowed that luxury. Such is the dazzling promise of undying romantic love. When it flutters in our hearts, it makes us soar above the realm of the real and into the realm of the metaphysical, or simply, fantastical.
Think First vs. Act First
Some of these significant, potentially life-altering decisions, can seem daunting. Indeed, to a rationalist, an intellectual, the philosophical priority is to think first, act later. Making any significant decision without evaluating or understanding its pros and cons and having a clear understanding of how things will unfold, can seem akin to walking into chaos with a blindfold on. To keep all the options open until there is heightened clarity, seems like a preferable choice. A lot of literature is testimony to the tragedy that ensues when we act first, think later (if at all), typically in the throes of passion. Think Romeo and Juliet. And it’s no wonder that we are fascinated with all the choices that we killed in our life. A lot of contemporary cinema and literature explores parallel universes in which we make different choices. Think Everything Everywhere All At Once.
A think first, act later approach, while sound, can often cause indecision, especially when enough information is not available to predict exactly how the big, life-altering decisions will impact our life and that can lead to indecision. While decisions kill other choices, indecision, unfortunately, is the death of all the choices available to us.
In Nobel-laurate Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, the youngest child of the al-Jawad family, Kamal, has the temperament of a philosopher. Heartbroken in his first love, he immerses himself into a life of ideas and commits himself to reading, thinking, questioning everything, and writing philosophical essays for various magazines in Cairo, believing that the life of ideas is his vocation and the only honourable pursuit. When he falls in love again, he is paralysed with indecision. Unable to choose between his desire to be with his beloved and the demands that the marriage will place on his time – time that he wants to devote to intellectual pursuits – he learns that his beloved has married someone else. This effectively kills both choices for him. Had he decided in favour of not marrying for the sake of his vocation, it would at least have been a choice, a decision that he made. Even if the outcome remained the same, the sense of agency that conscious choice affords would have been more tolerable than the tyranny of wondering ‘what if?’ for the rest of his life.
Is it better, then, to be decisive? Is act first, think later a better approach? Not necessarily. While modern society rewards decisiveness, and it is sometimes even stated as a requirement in job interviews, it is hardly a virtue in and by itself. The issue with approach is that it encourages an impulsive approach to decision making. Relieving us from decision-making, choices-killing anxiety in the present, it often merely shifts the anxiety into the future, where it might manifest as a lamentation.
In the TV series Californication, writer and protagonist Hank Moody uses the advance on his novel to impulsively purchase a Porsche convertible (the 911 Cabriolet). It might seem rash, but at least he had a car and derived some joy from the purchase. We are not told if he ever “thought later” about his decision and if he thought it was the right thing to do or a rash one. He wasn’t the type to dwell on such mundane matters, rarely stopping to reflect on the past.
Now let’s take a hypothetical example of a young aspiring writer who loves the show because it’s one of the rare on-screen depictions of a writer as a hero. He has a corporate job and a plan: he wants to build a corpus that can generate enough passive income for him to be financially independent. That would allow him to leave the corporate life and become a writer – which is his dream.
In one of the many parallel universes, let’s call it Life Journey #1, inspired by Moody’s swagger and this act first, think later approach, the aspiring writer is tempted to make a similarly rash decision with the annual bonus from his corporate job. This would inevitably become a source of lamentation a few years later, when the car loses its shine. The pleasure inducing dopamine kick from the impulsive purchase wanes quicky, but the stress inducing cortisol from the routine service and maintenance visits, and from the setback to the dream, take much longer to wane.
In Life Journey #2, the aspiring writer checks his impulse and is pulled back, by his thinking, rational mind, to reality. He decides to invest the bonus for the sake of his financial independence. But because he gave ascendancy to thinking first (as opposed to acting first), he finds himself stuck with making a mind-numbing choice between financial instruments to invest in. He is rendered indecisive. Years pass, with the money lying in his bank account, earning a negative return because inflation erodes the real value of the bonus. A car would have at least been something real to cherish, even if momentarily.
In Life Journey #3, the aspiring writer checks his impulse to buy the car, but not his impulse to invest in the first reasonably good financial instrument he finds. Five years later, he learns that the returns on his investment are not the best, but they are a couple of percentage points higher than inflation. And because he has been investing regularly over these five years, and the returns have been growing with compounding interest, he now has a sizable corpus and is many steps closer to realising his dream.
So, in effect, what we need is to strike a balance between thinking and acting. For the life-altering decisions, the push and pull between what our analytical brain, the prefrontal cortex, thinks is best for us (financial independence in the example) and what our emotional brain, the amygdala, instinctively wants (a Porsche convertible in the example) is at the core of most decision-making anxiety. One of these will win, killing the other choice, often irrevocably.
But wait, why irrevocably? In Life Journey #3, the aspiring writer should be able to buy a convertible with the advance from the novel he writes once he becomes a writer. Right? In Life Journey #1, he was impulsive and merely pushed out the anxiety to his future self. In Life Journey #3, by not being impulsive, didn’t he push out the joy to his future self?
Alas, our desire for our young aspiring writer to have best of both the worlds (financial independence and buying a convertible, albeit later in life) is just our innate desire for a cosmic reward for making the ‘right decisions’. Reality has no interest in such metaphysical ideas and fantasies. In Life Journey #3, when the young man gets to his middle age as a financially independent and self-supporting writer, he finds the dynamics of the publishing industry changed and a new paradigm where an advance for a novel is non-existent and if he is lucky, the royalties are large enough only to replace his walking shoes, which wear out quite quickly since he has to walk everywhere without a convertible.
The Rational Mind and Social Logic n.0
It is generally accepted that the prefrontal cortex, the rational mind, is fully developed only by the age of 25 years. Before that, it’s probably best to seek advice from others who have a fully-developed prefrontal cortex and who put it to use (please note). An implicitly agreed upon social logic, however, states that we don’t need our prefrontal cortex to be fully developed to make all our decisions, which is probably why, in most countries, we are allowed to vote, marry, smoke and drink much before that age. Most societies believe that the prefrontal cortex is developed enough for us to make rational decisions, if we want to, by the time we are 18.
It is strange, nevertheless, that we are asked (and allowed) to make these major decisions when we are 18, when we are liable to act first, impulsively, and think later, which is often too late, especially when it comes to the high possibility of addiction with smoking and drinking. Back when our life expectancy was 40 years, it probably made sense to unleash unformed minds out into the real world. It wasn’t the addictions that killed us. When our life expectancy is approaching 90, and increasingly larger number of people are dying from the cellular-level damage caused by these addictive behaviours, we can perhaps afford to wait till we turn 25.
Unfortunately, the way things stand, a lot of our life-altering decisions must be made before that age. Who we are, in our adulthood, is largely a function of what the society (which includes our parents) tells us to do since we are unable to think first and act later for a large part of our early life.
While our prefrontal cortex is still developing, it is the social logic of our milieu that is imposed on us whenever we are told to make a decision about anything we are unable to think rationally about. And, once imposed, the social logic also reaffirms itself via us. It is, then, our responsibility to think, as much as we can, with our still developing prefrontal cortex before we make the decisions that we are told to make. We should accept them only if we see potential of some good in them and reject them if we see them as flawed. And we should continue to think, once we have acted, knowing that with a fully developed prefrontal cortex, we might have made a different decision. This understanding can help update the social logic as we guide others, including the next generation towards making better choices. Our ability to think, like spider-sense and an ability to shoot out spider-webs from human wrists, is a great power and a great responsibility.
Take for example most educations systems in the world. Between the ages of 13-15, we are asked to make perhaps the most significant of life decisions which results in the first of many deaths of our dreams and fantasies. Without much understanding, or a fully-formed ability to think and rationalise, we have to choose between humanities, sciences, arts, commerce or vocational education/training. While some might have a strong inclination, others would largely be influenced by their parents, a career counsellor or what they see in the world around them. They might choose employability (no. of jobs in the market), the salary levels, and which choice can give them the best chance to survive. Often, the day before the big decision, a child might harbour a dream of becoming a writer, an actor, or an astronaut. The day after it, the child is supposed to harbour dreams of sitting at a desk in an office.
In our recent history, the social logic of things has dictated that we study so that we can find work that pays well. But a part of why we study, or learn, is also to understand our history, literature, arts and other non-STEM fields that have immense value. Education and learning have many benefits, chief among which have long been accepted as non-utilitarian. By over-indexing on the utilitarian aspects of education, viz. employability and salary levels, we foster and perpetuate a culture where human worth is likely to increasingly be conflated with net worth. Not many years ago, we looked up to the ones who remembered and could recite entire poems and passages from novels. Now, we risk creating a world that looks up only to the billionaires.
The social logic doesn’t stop there, however. It’s far more tenacious. A good job allows us to buy a house and get married, within the constraints of religion and caste, in to a higher economic class than we were born in. As life goes on, with little else to do, we surround ourselves with the latest material comforts. And then, once we have our own children, we strive to give them the best possible opportunities. These children are then tasked with perpetuating the self-same cycle. In rare cases, there are minor alterations to the cycle when some are encouraged to pursue a career in professional sports or arts — but the rest is likely to remain the same.
While this might be a worthwhile life purpose for some, it’s hard to imagine as it being the sole purpose for all of human life. And for those who don’t believe in this purpose, it should be easier than it is currently to break free from the cycle perpetuated by a single, dominant social logic.
Slowly, on account of the actions of some human beings, who use their fully-developed prefrontal cortex and think, the cycle can slowly be interrupted, even if not disrupted. A world with multiple social logics and cultural priorities will be more accommodating of the inherent diversity in what we value as individuals and will allow a broader choice of human purpose, instead of maximising only that which can be measured and quantified.
Love & Forgiveness
Over the past few decades, some things have certainly improved along each of the steps of the cycle perpetuated by the social logic. Like how marrying for love, rather than for logistical or practical reasons, has gained more traction in the current culture, shaped by the amazing human beings who fought hard against the social logic of their time to marry for love and then gifted the new social logic to their children.
Falling in love with someone is to give into the pull of the emotion. It is also to act first and think later. Once in committed love, the couple thinks of strategies to overcome the challenges in their way. These may be from the society, their parents, or from each other. Given that in our current culture nothing prepares one for married life, people bravely commit to the act of marrying before they think of how to make it work.
Even when we think first and act later, with a still developing prefrontal cortex in our youth, we will find it hard to always be right. That should not even be a goal that we aspire to since it creates a lot of unnecessary pressure. Unnecessary because we can’t do much about a biological constraint. And it’s perhaps not ideal to defer all decision making until after we are 25 years old.
What this realisation offered me was a freedom from a grudge I have long held against the social logic of my times. At the age of 14, when I had to make the biggest of all career choices, I relied on the wisdom of my parents, and chose the path that would result in me becoming an engineer. I had no strong feelings, one way or another, at that stage and it made sense to choose a path that would make me employable. It was only when I was about 22 years old, and my prefrontal cortex was closer to being fully developed, that I realised that I loved writing. It was at this stage that I became like the young aspiring writer from our example. And this understanding, I hope, is a salvation from the angst I have been carrying - blaming myself, the society, my parents for putting me on a path that wasn’t the best fit for me. There’s no reason to be mad at biology, after all. And we did the best we could with what we had to work with.
Given this way of the world, due to no one’s fault but our biology, the task that befalls us more often than not is one of committing to think later, after we have already acted. And as we have just seen, it’s an important one for at one level it can be the difference between being well-adjusted or feeling like a victim, and at another level, the difference between merely adjusting to the world as we find it or shaping it into something better through updating the social logic.
Living, learning and sharing
Even with a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, when we consider any major decisions, often there isn’t enough information available to make an assured no-regret decision. We can make lists of pros and cons and play out each of the multiple choices to their logical end to envisage how things could end up, but as we saw, it’s impossible to be exhaustive. In such situations, again, we must act and decide whatever we think is best and embrace the chaos that ensues, learn from it, and help update the social logic.
In 2020, I decided to let my hair grow. Then on a particularly windy day, they got in my eyes a lot and I decided to cut them myself at home, still wary of COVID. I ended up shaving my head, accidentally. I cried before I could laugh at myself, but I learnt my lesson. Or maybe I didn’t because I am letting them grow again. At least this time I have a cap for windy days.
Similarly, I decided to buy a car because everyone seemed to have one. I was overwhelmed all the brands and options. I ended up relying on the research my friends had done and just bought the same car. For two years, I embraced the chaos. With the pleasure of a shiny new object which also helped me get to remote hiking locations twice as fast as with public transport, came the guilt of environmental damage and a list of chores: maintenance, cleaning, and getting the tyres changed in the winter and summer. Then I sold it off. The tipping point was the realisation that I don’t like driving since it makes me anxious. I constantly imagine the worst-case scenarios: everything that could possibly go wrong and how I would keep myself and my co-passenger(s) safe. I torture myself by playing these scenarios in my head the entire time I am driving. If there are others who suffer similarly without realising it and have a choice in the matter depending on which city they live in, perhaps they will appreciate this in the list of potential cons and the social logic will be richer.
Whether we follow the path that the social logic dictates or deviate from it, we might find what can be done better, what needs to change in that social logic. But only if we pay attention to it and are honest in our assessment of our decisions rather than feeling compelled to defend our actions or hold on to them dearly, placing them beyond scrutiny. If we are able to do that, not much shall be lost.
With the gift of hindsight, we can assess the choices we make. Whether the choice was made before we were capable of thinking first, or after that stage in our life, we must remain committed to understanding our decisions, thinking about the alternatives we killed in the process, and coming to an understanding of what might work better than what was our lot in life. We don’t have to barrel down the path we’ve set on or the path we’ve been set on, with a blindfold on, because that only serves the purpose of perpetuating the cycle, through the momentum of reaffirmed social logic, that is potentially detrimental to our own future and, perhaps more so, for the next generation.
For now, as I write this article, I am thinking what more can I add. I am in the space of many possibilities. But in the interest of ending of this piece I will have to kill the other possibilities, including the possibility of typing the next line. Some readers might have killed the possibility of reaching this point in the article if they quit midway. For those of you who made it to the end, thank you for choosing this one of many possibilities that you had.
Hope to catch you in the next piece I write. Wish me luck in overcoming the dread of killing numerous choices, as I decide the topic.
Love reading such pieces 😊