Before we take decisions, we make it out life’s purpose to ‘create options’. The bigger decisions, the more the options we like to have.
Yeah. I took that job and turned down blah, blah and blah. or
Yeah. I had great difficulty choosing that school. I had all these great schools to choose from.
Options make us feel good. They make us feel like we’re not desperate. Probably most importantly, they feed our illusion of control.
They don’t make our decisions easy by any stretch of the imagination unless we have one clear winner. If they are all equal or sort of equal, then choosing becomes a very difficult process. We end up consulting everyone relevant looking for a rational, logical reason and then end up taking a decision based on our emotions anyway..
That said, they still make us feel good at least for a little while. And nothing good comes without it’s share of challenge.
Paradoxically, the moment we make a decision and decide to plough ahead is the moment when options become like spoilt food in the fridge. Keep them for too long and they begin to stink. They remind us that they still exist and make us think of what life might have been if we had chosen them.
Sometimes, as a result of our visceral emotional reaction to losing things we have, we aim to keep as many options as we can open for as long as we possibly can. People do this with jobs, schools and often, even with relationships!
The issue here is that while options may give us a bit of joy the moment they appear – in the long run, they don’t really make us happy.
In fact, feeding them has exactly the opposite effect.
Predictable irrationality.
It probably comes down to our definition of success. We think of success as having an array of options and then choosing the most logical/rational option that would give us maximum benefit.
The big question, of course, is – Is that really success?
A Learning a Day 