How Decision-Making Can Suck Less

I think I have a revolutionary, earth-shattering idea.  Prepare yourself.  Are you ready?  Okay.What if you could make decisions about your life–be them about what to wear to a party, whether you should move to Phoenix, or if you should have tacos for lunch–without also feeling like you want to kill yourself?

I’ll give you a second to pick the pieces of your blown mind up off the floor.

I fucking hate making decisions, and I always have.  Every time someone leaves it up to me to make a decision, my feeling in response is always inevitably, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“How dare you place the burden on me to pick one option, like I have any idea what the best course of action will be in this unknowable world?  How about this?  I’ve decided that I want you to die in a fire.”

I’m not particularly unique in this.  For many people, making decisions is a terrible, stressful undertaking.

As us indecisives see it, there is no right or wrong.  There is no objective “best” option.  Everything in the world has pluses and minuses.  Everything has an inherent chaotic uncertainty attached to it.  Every decision could lead to unintended consequences that we have no way of understanding right now.

So fuck!  How, oh how, can I ever really decide if I should marry this schmuck, or if I should quit school and pursue my dream of being a belly dancer at parties, or what is the “best” pair of pants to buy?!

Here’s the annoying thing about this paranoid nuttiness from wishy washy idiots like me: we’re totally right.

You can’t know if the job in column A is really the best option, or what major will lead you down the right path, or if you’re best off following your instinct to pursue the girl with the big jugs instead of the one you actually enjoy talking to.  The universe is chaos.  You could always be wrong, and your wrong decision could ruin everything.

So…fuck!  What do we do?  Isn’t making a definitely right decision impossible then?  Aren’t we right to worry, and pace, and panic over every decision?

Well no.  That sucks ass.  Stop living like that.  It’s stressful, it’s not helpful, and it leads to everyone you know constantly saying, “God, shut up, dude.”  (Or at least, I assume that’s why they’re saying it.)

But worse than all of that, habitually being indecisive inevitably leads to you consistently making the worst decision that you can make–inaction.  Indecision is how you spend 90 minutes browsing Netflix without ever selecting anything, it’s how you end up staying in and making a peanut butter and salami sandwich because you have nothing else in the house, and it’s how you don’t ever go for your dreams.

You never clearly decide, so you never clearly try.   Indecision always defaults back to the safest, lamest you’ll-regret-this-when-you’re-60 option possible.  So we have to learn how to put indecision in its place, kick its ass, and make it feel terrible about itself.

So how can we fix this?  How can we make decisions that are not terrible without constantly pulling our hair out and feeling like Ralphie May is sitting on our chest?  I’ve found that it is possible to improve this awful tendency with a few simple steps–even for the most anxiety-ridden, unsure, wishy-washy assholes out there–which I can say because, well, I’m one of them.

Let’s break this down.

1) Is This Life or Death?

Life or death decisions aren’t what we’re really talking about in this article, so it’s good to determine whether that’s the nature of your decisions as soon as possible.  Considering a cancer treatment?  Thinking about whether or not to eat that ball of coagulated pork fat when you have a serious heart condition?  Wondering if you should follow through on your bet to play chicken by the train tracks because you lost a game of pool?

Go on, and take those decisions seriously.  But keep in mind that you’ll make literally millions of decisions in your life, and around five of them will actually be life or death, so like, more likely calm the fuck down.  Take a breath.  Close your eyes.  Let a puppy lick your face.  Reset and remember how unimportant nearly all of this is.

I feel like you might need some help with this, so here we go.  Here are some examples of decisions that might seem vitally important in the moment, and might be huge sources of stress in your life, but are in fact totally meaningless in the grand scheme of things:

1) Which apartment you choose.
2) Where to go to lunch today.
3) Whether or not to go on a date with the guy with an eyepatch in his Tinder photo.
4) Whether or not to try a new career for a year.
5) What kind of lotion will best moisturize your T-zone.
6) Where to propose to your significant other.
7) Whether to mow the lawn this morning or around lunch time.
8) Whether or not to buy tickets to see Usher because you’re wondering if Herpes can become airborne.
9) What breed of dog to get.
10) WHAT. TO. WEAR.

If you start to think any of these really matter, your values suck and you’re being a dipshit.  They make no difference towards anything in the grand scheme of life.  And here’s a little thing to remember: The grand scheme of life is what actually matters.

2) Determine If the Decision is Easy

Ensure that this isn’t something that can be made following a simple line of logic.  If you’re trying to find the main drag in a strange town and there’s a bunch of activity to your right and 4 tumbleweeds to your left, think for a second before you yell, “I don’t know!  The GPS isn’t saying anything!” and drive straight into a wall like a dumbass.

Conventional decision-making is still your best first option.  It always is.  Take the recommended dosage of logical and strategic thought with every decision to see if that helps with anything.

But when it doesn’t help, don’t chug the whole fucking bottle of it.  Instead go to step number 3.

3) Pick a Thing and Give it a Shot

If the decision isn’t either of these–if choosing wrong won’t end in you dying, or if a few minutes or hours of  thinking through the logic of a situation leaves you still feeling up in the air, then remember this: a few days won’t help you decide, nor will a few weeks, or a few years.

Waffling, pulling your hair out, shitting your pants and torturing yourself over a decision would only be useful if it eventually led you to making a confident, definitely correct decision.

And spoiler alert: it fuckin’ doesn’t.

This may blow your mind, but walking around your room and crying, “Mom, what brand of pillow should I get!” actually doesn’t do much for you.  Eventually, you reach a breaking point in your rumination where you’re just chasing your tail, like a dumbass.

If you’re unsure now–if you’re not even slightly leaning one way on your decision–then sitting there and running through the same scenarios in your head over and over isn’t going to do shit.  You just look like an asshole.

So in short, don’t be a dumbass.  Pick a thing and do it.

But still…how do we decide which thing to do?

4) Use Your Intuition (Mostly because fuck it)

Many are told to listen to their intuition in this situation, which is a fancier way of saying, “I don’t know, dude.  Just fucking guess.”

What I’ve come to realize over the years is that, if your logic has left you simply pacing and panicking, listening to your intuition or your “gut” isn’t really a bad idea–but not for the reasons you may think.

Your intuition is not some internal source of wisdom.  It doesn’t know more than your reason or logic, and it’s not helping you to make the right decision in that sense.  Your gut is basically a dumbass.  It’s you shrugging, and taking a right.

But your intuition is useful because using it makes you feel better when you make the decision, and there’s value in that.  You’re more likely to act with confidence and comfort, and that can sometimes be enough to turn an awful decision into a bearable one.  It can turn “You went to…Poland on your honeymoon?” to “You went to Poland on your honeymoon!”

So sure, go with your gut mostly because, fuck it.

“Well shit,” you may be thinking, “You’re almost acting like it doesn’t matter whether or not I actually make the right decision.”

Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m driving at here.

5. Remember: Almost of all of your decisions don’t really matter.

This is the key to being more comfortable with your decision-making.  Approach all of your decisions as if they are less important than you’re making them to be…because they are.  If you take everything that happens to you in stride, then the results of your decision aren’t that big of a deal.  After all, you’re still in stride no matter what happens.  So regardless of what results come from your decision, just continue striding somewhere, dummy.

Has your bad decision left you stressed?  Mad?  Sad?  Angry?  Horny?

Fucking do something about it.  It’s that simple.  Stay in motion, keep plowing through the shit you accidentally put in your own path, and keep trying to lead a kickass life.

If you approach your life this way–as constantly being in the mode of kicking the shit out of every problem you come across–then problems, whether created by you or not–aren’t that intimidating.  They’re part of the territory.  They’re the thing you’re fixing today.

So you passed up your dream job for something more lucrative, and you find yourself wanting to stab yourself in the eye with your pen every day at work?

Well all right, that’s your current state.  What can you do to change it?  How can you get out of this kerfuffle?  What comes next?  What can you do to switch back to another career?  What can you do to make your shitty new job more tolerable?  Who at work do you trust that you can you put on “Don’t let me stab myself in the eye” duty?

If you approach a decision with, “If this goes south, I’ll die,” then of course every decision will feel torturous and stressful.  But almost every decision isn’t that, and isn’t worth giving that energy.

If you instead approach every decision with, “Well this is what I’m going with, and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll adjust,” decision-making suddenly becomes fucking easy.  Suddenly you’re much freer to choose a new career, or to go for a hike this morning, or to break it off with that goober of a boyfriend who constantly wants to watch documentaries about birds.

It comes down to this: maintain maximum levels of optimism, wherewithal, and kickassery, and the results of your decisions are practically footnotes in your life.

And hopefully, when you adopt this practice, you’ll more consistently make the best decision a person can make.

So this all basically comes down to this: doing things in life is fucking crucial.  We don’t do nearly enough.  We waffle, we consider, and then we go watch a marathon of Chopped, and before we know it, we’re 47, single, and the only thing we’ve ever done is to get another 7 cats.

So if you’re a habitually indecisive, wishy-washy asshole like me, here is a start for you.  Your best decision moving forward can be summed up with this: Start doing something.  Start moving somewhere.

I don’t know where you need to go, and you may not either, but then here’s the only guarantee: sitting still won’t do anything for you.  After all, what are you really if you just sit still and never move anywhere?  Are you even still a person?  Aren’t you more so just kind of a table that farts and has opinions about Star Wars?

Life will just literally pass you by like this, so you have to move somewhere.  You have to do something.

Take a wild guess, get going, learn from your bullshit, and adjust if you need to–knowing full well that no matter what you decide on, the world will not end.  This mentality will save you tons of time and wasted energy, and it will help you make the only consistently right decision of doing things.

You will fail when you do things.  You will make God awful decisions that set you back further than you were before.  You will get a tattoo of your boyfriend’s name, and then he’ll run over your cat with his Tundra and ask your sister-in-law for nudes.  Keep a mentality of “so the fuck what” and keep moving.

Bring on the waves of shit.  Accept the fallout of the stupid choices your stupid brain makes and keep going.  Just keep fucking doing, man.