What do you do with decisions?

I used to think that making decisions was one of the activities we sometimes do. 

Just like shopping, doing laundry, delegating, or calling your parents, you also have to make decisions. But that’s not true - we make choices all the time. In fact, in terms of frequency, decision-making is a lot more like breathing. We make decisions all day long: from the decision to get up and face another day, to selecting the clothes we wear, to what mood we will stick to, to the food we’ll put into our bodies, to everything else that day. 

Neo must decide: Red pill or Blue pill?

Our lives are basically one never-ending series of decisions and choices. If also not making a decision is a decision, it only follows that how we make choices occupies a much more prominent place in the hierarchy of our daily activities. It suddenly becomes obvious that it’s the thing that we consciously and subconsciously do all the time. 

We assume that when it comes to decision-making, we are going through the process of weighing the pros and cons. But alas. That would be too easy. Decision making is not, and it cannot ever be, anywhere near the elusive, two-column, crisp, clear, logical, and rational, neatly divided beauty that management experts and productivity gurus preach about. That sexy dreamy ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis’ of their presentations. 

Most decisions in our lives are not made using the Cost-Benefit analysis. Because life is not a business, and we are not robots. And because most things are of very different value, so weighing them on the same scale makes no sense. 

How we make decisions ultimately reflects who we are. It is a direct demonstration of our self-love and self-confidence. So suddenly, all of these layers are mixed into the decision-making process. And these layers are not, unfortunately, divided into neat categories that would sit on top of each other like tiers of a cake. 

On the subconscious level, when it comes to choices, there is a lot more at work: we add sprinkles of sibling rivalry, family traumas, or whatever story we tell ourselves since we were six years old. Maybe we can toss our political or gender roles in there for good measure, too. So instead of a tightly packed Schichttorte with perfectly divided lines, we are left with a disfigured, muddled mess. 

Schichtortte, Courtesy of Emma Forth,

Our decision-making is one big, intertwined chaos that looks like the burst of all the colors thrown in the air during the Indian Holi festival, rather than the aforementioned perfectly layered German cake. (Which, incidentally, does sound like ‘shit cake’, doesn’t it? Are you kidding me? How fun is that? Schichttorte? Come on!) 

This is to say that decision-making is a huge topic. It is all encompassing and so so big, that I could have written a whole book about just that. We can discuss decision making along the line of Daniel Kahnemann’s thinking fast and slow, we can categorize decision-making by the greatness or smallness of the subject in question (in other words: is this a big decision or one that does not matter much?), or we can talk about the physiological processes in our bodies that occur when we are making a specific choice. 

Here, I will divide the topic into two big categories and focus on only one. As my friend Blanka likes to say: this is just how I want to portion up the beast. 

So in the name of simplicity, let’s split decision-making into two parts. First, the actual act of deciding - let’s call it the active deciding, the making of the decision. This is the process of decision-making, the rational, psychosomatic, and emotional aspects of it, all under one umbrella for now. 

But then there is a somewhat adjacent, yet perhaps even more important angle of how we approach the decision that we take or have taken. I would lovingly and colloquially label it ‘what happens next’. 

This is a far bigger deal than people realize. It’s in fact so important that I practically guarantee that once you notice it, you won’t stop checking for it, and you will likely filter people in your life through that lens. Before diving into this nomenclature, it might be worth noting that we aren’t rigid creatures and we’ll make different kinds of choices, depending on the decision at hand, yet in general, we stick to one prevalent pattern in all our choices. 

People generally fall into three big categories in this division of how they approach decisions or choices they have already made. 

In the first team are people who struggle to decide at all. This is the group ruled by anguish and anxiety. People in this camp agonize over options and opportunity costs of all the alternatives possible. The pressure to make the right choice is so overwhelming that they end up not choosing at all. Which, of course, is the worst choice. However, the pressure to pick one side is debilitating as well. They stress over every little decision in their lives, and as a result, they struggle to distinguish between big and small decisions, and they end up avoiding decision-making at all costs.

People in this first camp are notorious procrastinators, incapacitated by analysis paralysis, unable to move towards one option over the other, helplessly stuck at square one. There may be a slew of reasons why people fall into this category, but in general, they all boil down to one: people who are afraid to make a choice believe, deep down, that they are not enough.

And because they think that they are not enough, they don’t believe they can make a good decision. 

The catch is that just like the guy hanging out with the kid who could see dead people, they don’t know that this is why they can’t decide. They will explain to you ad nauseam that it’s because they are still weighing the options, just being diligent, that it’s because they need more information, or because they are not sure they can make that call just yet. Or, they will excuse it by perfectionism. In any case, the paralysis to move forward with any decision makes it really hard to build a relationship or a future or a business with a person like this. And if this rings true to you, then you know it’s frustrating and deeply tragic because you know it holds you back: it’s not like you are not aware of your indecisiveness - you may label it differently for yourself (I had a client call himself ‘an overachieving perfectionist’ just last week, when it fact, he was crumbling under the heavy harness of his own insecurity he couldn’t escape). You sense that there is something invisible yet powerful that has a hold on you and that prevents you from saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with conviction. This bridle is tight, and it stops you from committing to a new hobby, or going on an awesome trip, or saying yes to a career you’d love, or a person you want. It holds you back from running towards things you want because, deep down, you don’t believe you can. 

Then, in the second team, we have people who make decisions but regret them instantly or eventually. The tragedy of these people is that they never live in the present: they either keep going back, ruminating, and trying to take back decisions they already made. Or, they live in the plethora of hypothetical futures. In the endless what-ifs and what-could-have-beens fantasies. What we have here, Watson, are the women (and men) who will obsess over their high school reunion and stalk their college roommates or colleagues from their first job for no other reason than to keep developing some crazy parallel lives that they created in their minds. In those storylines, they said yes to that guy, or that promotion, or that idea, and now that would have been somewhere else, living a completely different life. In reality, of course, they didn’t say yes, so here they are, at midnight, browsing their ex-classmates', ex-roommates’, ex-colleagues’ Instagram. Here they are, keeping track of all those decisions not taken, roads not traveled. They are like a manic mob double bookkeeper maintaining a tally of potential outcomes, filled with the most elaborate story arcs that they meticulously craft over the years and decades. Because these people have phenomenal imagination. Robert Frost would weep. They are also 10/10 challenging partners. They often return to the past, or wander into their imaginary future, but they are rarely here and now, in the present with you. And ultimately, if they wonder if they made the right decision in the past, they don’t really trust themselves to make the right decision now. 

Celine Song’s movie Past Lives (2023) captures some of this.

In the film, a man and a woman who, at one point in the past, had a strong connection, meet again. They didn’t date in the past, but now there seems to be an opening. The woman is married, but the man comes to visit her, and this creates the tension of the plot. 

First of all, spoiler alert. Second, I could not have wished for a better bridge between the second and third groups of people based on their approach to decisions. 

Because this is what happens in the movie: the woman ponders the choice she made when she married her husband. She enjoys the evening hanging out with both men - her husband by her side, reminiscing about her childhood with an old friend, and yes, perhaps also, entertaining some future tripping and ideation of what it would be like if she actually followed this possibility now. But ultimately, she says goodbye to her friend and comes back to her husband. There is an understanding that she made a choice, a commitment, and she’s OK with that call. This is her life now.*

When it comes to choices and how we approach them, this would put the heroine in the third group. The rarest of them all. These are people who make a call. They decide something. They execute. And then, they move on. These are the people who accept that whatever decision they made then was the best decision they could have made or, at minimum, it was the decision that they made, anyway. And so that’s that. Not much they can do about it, is there? So they move. The. F. On. 

Let me tell you. These people - they have a magic power. They are the best life partners. Not because they lack the ability to reflect. That’s a nuance we don’t want to miss. Reflection is important. I am not praising knuckleheads who go through life without inner dialogues, believing they don’t need to question their decisions because they are never wrong. But there is a fine line between a) reflecting on one’s action and learning from one’s mistake and moving on, and b) spending way too long dissecting every move and every thought and turning and tossing in the middle of the night replaying the dialogues that took place, or worse, that didn’t take place but possibly could have. 

The French have a wonderful term, Les Mots D’Escaliers. Which literally translates as ‘the words of the staircase’. The words that only come to you as you are leaving. The perfect comeback to somebody who just insulted you. Or the perfect reply to a sentence in an argument you later replay on the way home. But alas, that moment is gone, poof, the words might have come to you now, but that situation passed, and you are already on the escalator, whirring slowly away. 

People who can make a decision have enough confidence in themselves to go: “Alright, there could have been other scenarios, other options, but I went with this one, so let’s see where this is going”. These people don’t waste their resources, whether that’s time or energy, on silly stuff like imagining different dialogues and better comebacks in a conversation that took place last week. They are too busy living their actual life. People in this camp are the best partners because they don’t abandon the present for some potential past. They don't sacrifice their actual future for some hypothetical eventuality of an alternative life that could have been, had they chosen something different. 

They made a choice. They were right or they made a mistake. If they were right: fantastic. Let’s build on it. If they were wrong, OK, let’s own it. This is the goldmine of lessons learned, right? Everybody says that you learn more from the projects that didn’t work than from those that did. Whatever the choice, they just go with it, confidently. The best thing about people who can move through life accepting their choices and moving on is that they emanate this self-assurance. People in this third category decide something and then move in that direction. They don’t dwell on alternatives, they don’t obsess over potentialities. They trust their own ability to make decisions and execute them. Deep down, they believe that they have what it takes to make the decision and then deal with the outcomes, whatever they may be. It’s an intoxicating trait. And this isn’t just self-esteem or self-confidence. It goes beyond that. It’s an optimism about what’s coming, it’s a trust in the world. 

People in this third category not only believe that they are able to make whatever choice is necessary, but that the world is a place where, no matter the outcomes, they will always be able to handle the situation. The core difference between the people in the first two categories and this third one is that the last camp is filled with those who fundamentally believe that the world is safe. And whatever decision they make, it will be OK in the end, because they will be able to navigate it. 

This is a sign of a secure person. These people aren’t naive, assuming there isn’t any danger in the world, per se. It’s just that in their core, they don’t think that the world is out to get them. They don’t believe that they’re in some chronic, epic battle against the world, at all times, on top of whatever they’re doing every day. That omnipresent hum of dread is just not present in their world.  

I know a number of these rare creatures, and what’s fascinating is that they rarely realize how unusual they are. They often think everybody is like them because, of course, we tend to assume that things that come easily to us are easy. 

But I can also confirm that we can all get to this point, even if we spent the first few decades of our lives firmly planted in the first or second camp. Arriving in the third group, where you shake off the idea that the world is out to get you, is possible. You can absolutely realize that you are, in fact, enough and capable of making the best decisions you can at the time, and then move on. I’ve done it. I’ve seen my clients do it. 

It requires awareness, so ask yourself: Which house do you currently belong to? House of Avoiders or Perpetual Fantasizers? And do you want to do something about it? The choice is yours.  

Past Lives explores the Buddhist concept of inyeon  (인연) where two souls are coming and meeting over many different lives. In some of these lives, they may not be available but they are still soulmates; they just have to wait until the one future life where they finally meet at the right time, under the right circumstances. The final scene can be read as: ‘maybe we are soulmates, but it’s ok, this one is just one of many past lives we have to go through before finally meeting in the future’.