Decisions, Decisions
January 26, 2019 7:26 AM   Subscribe

An interesting delve into the process of making decisions.
posted by TruthfulCalling (4 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
The ambitious students find it easy to explain why they’re taking the class. But the aspirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreaching if you said that you were moved by the profound beauty of classical music. The truth, which is harder to communicate, is that you have some vague sense of its value, which you hope that some future version of yourself might properly grasp.

Wow, I am way too old to hear this for the first time. What a powerful and yet, in retrospect, obvious idea: We're simultaneously altering our circumstances to suit our future selves, and altering our future selves to like their circumstances.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 10:12 AM on January 26, 2019 [6 favorites]


Being a well-meaning phony is key to our self-transformations.

I am intrigued by this idea.
posted by Margalo Epps at 12:06 PM on January 26, 2019 [5 favorites]


It kills me that the author of this piece didn't take the opportunity to quote Darwin's single most famous line in the marry-or-not debate: "better than a dog anyhow". [full text, if you can read Darwin's handwriting]
Some of the people taking the music-appreciation class are ambitious; they enrolled not because they aspire to love classical music but because the class is an easy A.
That's not ambition! That's laziness! Ambition is taking the really tough classes and working your butt off to succeed in them. Jeez.

What's missing in this article, though the vague outlines of it are there, is that there are actually two kinds of "decisions" being discussed here. The easy kind is when you know your goals and you just need to figure out how to achieve them -- this is what all the rational decision-making metrics, war games, and scenario planning exercises for business investment are good for.

The hard kind is when you don't know what you actually want. Determining that, finding your own True Will, is the work of a lifetime (or more likely, several). Even working out the small things that you actually want is so very difficult, because we've been conditioned to think we want certain things, and to shut down the thought processes that might lead to what we actually truly want. This kind of "decision-making" isn't rational; it's orthogonal to rationality. This is what the author is groping towards when he writes about "opting" and finding the things that the New You will value.
posted by heatherlogan at 4:24 PM on January 26, 2019 [7 favorites]


In sum: fake it 'til you make it.
posted by mono blanco at 5:37 PM on January 27, 2019


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