How Are You Supposed to Make Decisions?
How does Present Me know what Future Me wants?
My favorite movie scene is this one, in which Robin Williams plays a refugee from the Soviet Union, overwhelmed by the amount of coffee choices in an American supermarket. My other favorite movie scene is this one, in which Donald Sutherland plays an art dealer mesmerized by the artwork in his kid’s second-grade class. When he asks the teacher how she transforms her students into little Matisses, she simply says that she knows when to take their drawings away from them.
I’ve been thinking about both scenes lately, because suddenly it occurs to me that I don’t know how to make a decision. I don’t know the process, the proper steps to take, to arrive at a decision. How are you supposed to decide things?
There are decisions I make every day, like what to eat, when to get up, what to wear, when to go to sleep, what to read, what to watch, what part of the house to clean, if at all, how far to walk Fish, but these aren’t really decisions at all. They are just quick reactive choices based on how exhausted I am.
If I’m at peak exhaustion, I’ll order in food and dig myself into more credit card debt. If I have a sparkle of energy, I might dump some store-bought tomato soup into a saucepan, congratulating myself on my frugality. But…
