Introduction
Decision making is an important part of life in many ways. All the way back from when you came into this world, and you became aware of yourself, you needed to start making decisions. What to think about, what to do with your time, and what to eat. At first, these decisions carry little weight, as they are usually structured or assisted by someone else, but eventually, they become more powerful.
In order to do what you want in life, you must constantly make decisions that further your goals. Unfortunately, even though caregivers' guardrails will fade as you get older, they are generally replaced by other entities, such as governments, businesses, and other forces that want to shape how you live.
Even though the people operating these entities are often well intentioned, the entities themselves are bigger than anyone's control, and their resulting actions often are not so well intentioned. This text explores both the way people make decisions, and also the emotional factors that influence them. It attempts to point to the importance of managing your decision making ability.
An Evolution Of My Decision Making
Stage 1: Paralysis
When I was very young, I didn’t really make decisions, I just chose the first thing that came to mind, and was done with it. However, when getting ice cream for example, I eventually realized that maybe someone else's ice cream flavor was better than mine. This prompts the first stage of decision making. In this stage, I became afraid of my ability to affect my life. See, my reaction to this newfound freedom was that I couldn’t do anything because I could do something wrong. There were like 25 ice cream flavors, and I didn’t have knowledge of most of them. How could I possibly decide???
At this stage, the problem is obvious, you can’t decide anything.
Stage 2: Pros And Cons
After I suddenly could not decide, the first technique I was explicitly taught for decision making was to make a list of pros and cons for each option and compare them. This is largely still how I make decisions, although I no longer make them explicitly in my head for most things. This technique makes it possible to make informed decisions at all. This time, when I went back for ice cream, I spent 15+ minutes standing outside of the line just envisioning all of the different flavors, each with different tastes, textures, sweetnesses, and other factors. Eventually I would choose one and get in line. However, when reaching the counter, a problem occurs: They are out of the ice cream I want. Oh no. I must imagine every flavor again, and that takes far longer than I have. Again, I can’t decide, and our decision making process must be revised further.
At this stage the problem is still fairly obvious, but I will still point it out: Change is hard, and thus unanticipated circumstances often cause paralysis.
Stage 3: Meta-analysis
The natural response to this as a parent then, is to wonder why this is so hard for your child and exclaim, “Just pick something! It's not like it matters!” Although basic advice, this provides the foundation for stage 3 of decision making. To use a list of pros and cons when necessary or important, but otherwise to fall back where we started, to just use the first thing that comes to mind. Now when I go to get ice cream I recognize that if another flavor turns out to be better than mine, I can simply get it next time, and thus this decision isn’t really important. Now I can successfully get ice cream! Hooray!
We are not out of the woods yet though, as this decision leads to one final problem:
Stage 4: Paralysis Again
Now that I know what is important, several questions come to my mind: “What makes something important?” “What is most important?” “Why do I care?” The problem is that these answers are not easy to come up with, or accept once you do. Perhaps I conclude based on things other people think are important, that important things affect the outcome a person or society experiences significantly. Then, the most important thing is the work I put in to make mine and other people's lives better. Therefore, I should work hard to get good grades, get into a good college, and always be on the lookout for opportunities to help other people do the same. I should get a job at a place that helps people feel and do better, and I should not support any organizations that do the opposite. I care because I like it when I feel good, and my mom says the golden rule is, “Treat others as you would wish to be treated.” When I go to school then, I always try my hardest, and do whatever is asked of me. I grow tired, I burn out, I become unhappy, and I have a meltdown.
I am now paralyzed again, despite my best efforts to make good decisions.
To make matters worse, I don’t even hold to my own ideals completely, and in this model, that's an important decision that I am making wrong. This thought process hastens the problem.
Emotion In Decision Making
Today, I recognize that, although all of this is still true, there is a hidden component that both drives and is driven by decisions. This component is emotion.
One way that decisions affect your emotion is in the way you think about them. If you view decision making as a sort of existential exercise, you trade long term success for short term happiness, recognizing that you only have one shot at life and you had better make it count. In other words, I didn't buy the ice cream in the first place. In this view, your decisions are all part of a larger effort that shapes your universe. In this way, knowing how to make decisions is a curse, because it puts a large responsibility on you that you must accept or face consequences.
However, thinking of it this way is not helpful, as it will result in unsustainable behaviors, and ultimately a meltdown like in stage 4. The other way to think about it, “nothing is important, I can do what I please,” also has undesired effects though.
Unfortunately I am not yet good at balancing these two things, however I do have an idea. My economics teacher just told me that, “Rational people think at the margin,” Is a core principle of economics. This principle means that when someone makes a decision using their rational brain, they tend to make a small change to their existing plan, with the hope that their decisions will build up over time into a big change.
In this model, you shrink down decisions into small sections, and perform one of them at a time. This would probably help me to not feel so overwhelmed, and to avoid the meltdown outcome, because I would have more time to recognize I was getting overwhelmed, before I got to the bad part. I will try to implement this technique now that I have thought about it.
Emotion As Leverage
One way that decisions are affected by emotion is the effect of how many options there are. When there are too many choices, I may be tempted to make the decision to go somewhere else, do something else, or avoid the choice. One example of this is that when I have the meltdown from stage 4, I may be tempted to choose some music to listen to, or some other content to consume to calm down. I may look for a movie, or get some music from bandcamp, but decide that the number of movies/albums is too large. Instead, I avoid the decision by going to the front page of Youtube, which has videos that the Youtube algorithm has lovingly curated and it knows I will like.
This is hugely problematic for a free society, and is not a hypothetical example. This happens to me often, and the thing that enables it is that Youtube knows so much about me that they are able to pull me in with the lure of an easier decision. This is problematic because it allows an organization with a lot of information to easily manipulate people into consuming their information, thus biasing the peoples worldview.
I therefore think that we as a society should try to prevent and discourage such unethical uses of data so as to lessen the number of people who fall into this trap.
Conclusion
With all of these decisions that we have to make, improving your decision making skill, and managing your energy is of great importance in order to continue to progress in today's world. So fight the battles you feel are important, and always be thinking about what is important. All types of people are needed to make the world work, so don’t be afraid to change what is important to you.
In addition, if, by chance, anyone reading this is in a position to discourage large organizations from collecting lots of data and biasing our worldview, then please do that. The future of our global society will thank you.
Sincerely, Jessica Haines