The issue that drove me to psychotherapy in my early 30s was this: whenever I had to make big decisions in my life, I’d go into decision paralysis. After three years of therapy, I still had this problem. Therapy was merely another dead-end in a long journey of trying to “solve” my decision paralysis.
Today, I see the root cause of my decision paralysis, and a way out. But before I get to that, let me describe a decade of dead ends.
Guru-hopping
During my mid-20s to mid-30s, I was like a frog on lily pads, jumping from guru to guru, from philosophy to philosophy. Driving this was a desire to have life be the way it was when I was a kid: when all I had to do to succeed was to do the things that the adults wanted me to do.
My first guru was Charlie Munger. I was unemployed, living with my parents during the 2008 financial crash. I felt a deep sense of shame. I had just graduated a fancy college alongside people who seemed to have it all together. Yet here I was, not knowing which direction to go with my career and unable to find a job. Something must be wrong with me, I thought.
I was thrilled to find Munger and his aphorisms on life, career, money. I consumed every quotation of his that I could find.
Over the next few years, I settled into a career path (not without some decision-paralysis along the way). The next big question on my mind was very broad: how should I live?
And the “guru” I found was not a single person, but a whole way of life: Orthodox Judaism.
Orthodox Judaism gave very clear answers to the “how to live?” question: you follow these very strict rituals, that’s how. It did not, however, give much space for questioning. In the long, run, I couldn’t just “turn off” my questioning mind. After a year or so, I gave up on becoming orthodox.
Over the next decade, my guru-hopping took a more “self-help” flavor. I wasn’t cool in school, so I followed gurus that promised me the key to coolness and charisma. When I wanted “answers” to how to have a good life, I took courses by psychologists.
I did a workshop to create an Annual Review plan for myself. At the time, I felt that this exercise was “the answer,” the key that would, once and for all, make my life OK.
This pattern — excitement about the guru, technique, or philosophy du jour, then a fading of this excitement, and then a discovery of some other thing that would solve all my problems — ultimately proved unsatisfying.
So, I slowed down. I asked myself: what’s driving this guru-hopping?
Fear: the root cause of my decision paralysis
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.
— Joan Didion
Look at your birth certificate. It doesn’t say life is easy. There is no easy life. There is no guarantee. There is no certainty. There is probability.
— Edith Eva Eger
In high school, I worked hard to maintain the appearance of success, at least on paper. My resilience was low. I believed that my life could be insured against failure, sadness, shame.
After more than a decade of guru-hopping, I realized that I was using gurus to avoid taking responsibility for making decisions.
I didn’t like the fear that came up when I had to choose between two uncertain paths. I wanted a guarantee that the path I was choosing was the “correct” one and everything would be OK.
For such a guarantee, I spent thousands of dollars over the years on books, courses, and appointments. I didn’t consciously know that what I was seeking in all this guru-hopping was certainty.
My pattern was this: I would discover a guru or philosophy or technique. After a while, when this thing failed to deliver a sense of certainty, I enthusiastically hopped to another one, subconsciously convinced that it would have all the answers. And so on, ad-infinitum.
A telling example: over the years, I got into two diametrically-opposed approaches to decision-making:
- The less wrong movement, which holds the view that we should make decisions as rationally as possible
- Authors and spiritual teachers who held the view that we should make decisions intuitively
Now I realize that both intuition and rationality are decision-making tools and neither one is “better.” Sometimes, it’s more skillful to use one, the other, or a combination of both. I’m realizing that every guru, technique, and approach likely holds some partial truth, is a tool in the toolbox of living well.
I accept now, that there is no end-all, be-all technique available to free me from the fact that the decisions I make are my own, and they may very well cause pain and suffering. As Joan Didion says, “some things are in fact irrevocable.”
Attaching to gurus allowed me to delay growing up. I replaced my parents with gurus, philosophies, techniques. As long as I attached myself to them, I could believe that there was a way to avoid the risk that comes with choosing.
This was delusional. In reality, there is no way to guarantee the path I’m taking in life will be pain-free. A routine choice — like choosing to drive — can end in catastrophe. Living is making choices, and making choices always involves risk. There is no philosophy or guru that can change this existential fact.
Four reminders to myself
“She’s decided to live her life, from the inside out. The sound of failure calls her name. She’s decided to hear it out.”
A choice came up the other day, and there I was, stuck in decision paralysis again: analyzing pros and cons. After a day or two of this, I made the decision. I realized that no amount of analysis would keep me from the fact that my choice could lead to problems. Things might not go well. But I was excited about my choice and that was enough.
I realize now that decision paralysis is a place my brain tends to go. But this doesn’t mean it has to stay there.
I wrote these four “notes to self” to hopefully help me break out of decision paralysis faster.
Dear Dan, when you are stuck in decision paralysis, contemplate these things:
- There is no way to remove the possibility of failure. Every choice is uncertain, and there is no guarantee that any choice, even a seemingly safe one, will be free of problems and pain.
- The “perfect” choice doesn’t exist. Every choice has trade-offs.
- Decisions exclude alternatives, by their very nature. The road not taken is “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” I’ll never get to truly experience it. We can only be in one place, do one thing, at one time. Living wholeheartedly in reality requires accepting this fact.
- See life as an infinite game. On the other side of this decision, there is more life, and more decisions to be made. Making this decision unlocks the flow of life.
Let me elaborate:
There is no way to remove the risk of failure from decision-making. The advice of others can help at times. But ultimately, I have to choose to go down one poorly-lit path or another. The path may bring me great joy, great sorrow, or anything in between.
In the past, I subconsciously believed that by analyzing a decision a million times, I could make “the right one.” But there is no “right” decision. There is only a decision, and then there’s life on the other side of the decision. And then there’s another decision. And then there’s more life.
Life is an infinite game. Even after we die, other life forms get to make more decisions, enabled by the decisions that we’ve made in our lives.
There is no perfect decision. There is only an imperfect choice that you can accept and grow to love. Be this choosing a ceiling fan or a partner.
The good news is that decisions which in the short-term look like “mistakes,” in 20 years may end up having taught us our most valuable lessons.
Think of the parable of the Chinese farmer.
Or the words of the Grateful Dead: “Life may be sweeter for this, I don’t know, see how it feels in the end.”
danscreativeoulet 