There are No Good Decisions
We spend vast fractions of life worrying and planning, telling ourselves that spinning around the same thought circles will increase the chances of dreams manifesting.
Getting older is realizing how little control we have. We cannot control our personalities, our finances, our bodies, other people, and of course, our futures.
Yet, we earnestly make plans. Time and again, they fall through or contort in ways none of the weeks at the vision board predicted. If we are observant, we also see our lives sometimes swerve for the better:
That friend we never planned to meet
The career path that fell into our lap
An identity we repress taking centre stage
Now, I am not asking not to plan at all.
We spend vast fractions of life worrying and planning, telling ourselves that spinning around the same thought circles will increase the chances of dreams manifesting. We weigh static options, consider unchanging opinions, and deny forward motion because we fear.
We need to make plans. Plans themselves are necessary and even unavoidable. The issue is we ascribe undeserved value to the difference they make to our trajectory. We get stuck in the planning phase when we could achieve more by executing and editing. Because at the end of the day, executing and editing is what we have to and end up doing.
As I assumed adulthood, it was difficult to ignore how badly my predictions and plans about the day and next turn out. This finding is also reflected in long-term plans.
For example, strikes and the pandemic intermittently extended my stay at university and made it impossible to foresee when I would finish. In the latter part of 2022, I went through my “new year targets” and saw that the most “reasonable” one was completing my remaining three months of uni which did not happen due to the 8-month-long ASUU strike. 2022 unfolded in an entirely different, unexpected, and rewarding way.
The environment beyond us teems with possibilities. You may wake up one day, and there is no more fuel subsidy, your friend has to move to another state, the power is out, or a bomb detonated a mile away. You can make plans A, B, C, but life follows plan Ձ. And even when you do everything the way you planned to, the fact that we can never consider or account for every variable leads to unexpected outcomes.
This knowledge started me thinking there are no good decisions.
I’m not talking about simple decisions like turning left or right on your way home or whether to cross the road now or wait till the car dashes past. I’m referring to more nuanced options like changing your field of study or resolving a love triangle. In this complexity, the binary of pass or fail we are taught at the start of life warps our relationships with results.
There is a spectrum of how we may react to facets of an outcome. We may even be unaware of the cause-effect between our decisions, actions, and outcomes. We may languish in short-term effects while the long-term awaits with benefits we fail to consider products of a long-forgotten choice.
There are presently no good decisions. You can wrack your brain from now till next year and fail to take action towards achieving your goals. You may go over the data a thousand times and discover numerous contradictions. You could consult people who experienced similar situations only to learn how varied their results were.
You will realize we are just guessing. We are deciding, in retrospect, what a good decision is.
This was an interesting read. For a while, I've been stuck on planning, executing some of these plans really have been an issue and thinking about it, about this narrative, there really might be no good decisions
guess I’ll just go do the thing then