The agony of choice
When there's no wrong path in the road, travelling becomes much easier
If you’re reading this essay, you’ve likely enjoyed a huge variety of choices in life. Choices about where or when to go to school, what job to take, where to live. The grocery store aisles are filled with every variety of food to select, there are endless options for entertainment, and in bustling cities there is an immense number of potential friends or partners. We have varying limitations depending on finances or other factors, but the freedom to choose in some ways is greater than ever.
Oftenwe see freedom of choice as essential - anything that limits choice, whether in the marketplace, the medical or legal system, might be seen as unfair monopolistic behaviour, tyranny or injustice. I myself favour freedom when it comes to most choices - if anything I fantasize of a world, or at least my city, where all but the most critical laws are abandoned in favour of a more trusting style of living, governed by natural consequences rather than human bureaucray.
Yet with choice comes the need to make a decision. And when we are caught up in our egos, which we often are, we can find it tiring, difficult, even overwhelming to choose. Part of this is because we have a lot of judgements, conditioned into us since birth, on what good choices are and what bad choices are. Our intellectual judgements may come into conflict with our fun-loving, short-term or pleasure-seeking instincts, which means that making any choice can often feel like going against ourselves. I judge that eating sugar is the worst, and my tastebuds say eating sugar is the best. So the choice of whether to eat a chocolate chip cookie for me can be ridiculously difficult as I have the internal battle over which part of me to listen to.
Difficulty with decisions increases when considering bigger areas of life, especially at pivotal times of change in education, marriage or our careers. We can be stressed by our choices or stuck in feelings of indecision for days, months, even years.
I was struggling with making a decision over the Christmas holidays - a very minor one about whether to stay in the city the entire time or go to my parents’ home in Georgian Bay. Nothing big was weighing on the decision, yet somehow I became mired in a million thoughts - worries that if I stayed in the city I’d be missing out on the beauty of the water, precious time with my sister’s family and parents, vs worries that if I went north I’d be unproductive, lazy, not fulfilling the obligations of my life in Toronto. My ruminations consumed me until it seemed like there wer no good choices - I could only see downsides. So I stopped and took a moment to question my worries.
I realized that, underneath it all, I was believing that it was possible to make the wrong choice. I looked at that belief with curiosity and I saw the following:
First, I saw that part of me was believing I could predict the future - my ego was busy spinning pictures of what it might look like if I made the choice to stay, and other pictures of what it would look like if I decided to go. My ego is better at creating problems than solutions a lot of the time, and so all it was doing was creating a whole host of problematic scenarios.
Secondly, I was believing it was possible that the path not chosen actually existed. Last year’s Oscar winning film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” depicted a world of multiverses, with every possible fork in the road splitting off into another universe. On some level, it’s as if we believe that the wrong choice will cause us to miss a better version of reality. Yet, even if those multiverses do exist, our own lived reality is that for us the only path is the one we are on. There is no other path, which means this is always the right one. Every fork in the road we choose disappears behind us, and all regret we feel is a result of falsely believing something better exists.
Thirdly, I was believing that my decision would be irreversible. We may not be able to change what’s around us, but we can change what we’re doing at any point. If I chose to go and headed off on the highway, I could change my mind and turn around at the first rest stop to come back home if it felt wrong. It seems simple, but I think sometimes we forget that we can change our minds with every moment of the day. With most decisions we can back up, turn around, change course.
Finally, I realized that the reason my decision-making was causing such a problem was a simple matter of fear. Fear of feeling regret, sadness, disappointment or boredom. But when such feelings come up for me they are almost always a result of what I’m thinking, not a result of what I’m actually doing. Which means “negative” feelings will likely show up at some point in my day no matter what choice I make. And, since I’ve faced these feelings and gone through them countless times in the past, there’s really no need to fear them. It’s okay if they come up again!
Going through our days without fear of making the wrong choice feels much more fluid and easy. When we are alive to the current moment, instead of caught up in the pictures of the past and future, we always know what we want. When I took the time to quiet my mind, it was crystal clear for me. I wanted to go up north, and from there all I had to do was make it happen.
If you want to make 2024 the year of easier decisions, I’m offering a short online workshop on January 22, the details and link to registration are here. Paid subscribers receive a promo code for 50% off.
All very well said!