![]() And now that people have time to contemplate and think about the direction of their lives, I think it's a great opportunity to slow down, take a breath and think about how to think and the question, who can I commit to being? The answer you come to - and I think you'll come to a bunch of different answers - will feed into how you face hard choices down the road.What makes these decisions tricky is that there is not a clearly correct course of action that can be determined by examining data. There's no doubt that the pandemic put a damper on beehive-like activity. The point is that you have this capacity to commit and to create value for yourself in your life instead of being a passive recipient. Most of us drift and go along with the status quo and were quite timid for good reasons, because if you think about our evolutionary history, you put a foot wrong and a snake bites you or you fall into quicksand. On the other hand, most of us are not like that. People admire people who appear to be always moving forward, doing scary, risky things. But if you are in a committed relationship, it's because your commitment to that person makes that person the right person for you. There's a bunch of people who are on a par. The truth is there isn't one person on the globe who's best for you with respect to all the things that matter and having a life partner. I think the best analogy of this is really love relationships. You actually get to create that value for yourself by committing. That's what's so scary about them, right? It's something we get to decide instead of looking out into the world and trying to discover some nonexistent fact about which path of life is best for you. They're like junctures in our life where we get to realize ourselves as one kind of agent as opposed to another. And when you commit to one path as opposed to another, you put your whole self behind it.Īnd when you do that, when you open yourself up to the possibility of making a commitment, you finally remake yourself right into or realize yourself as someone who has committed - to Bob, or to the career on the West Coast, or lumberjack-hood - and you make yourself into someone for whom it is now true that you have most reason to do that instead of the other thing. ![]() You have to open yourself up to the possibility of making a commitment. I call the small improvement test, and it doesn't follow that improving it a little bit makes it much better than the other one, then, you know, you're stuck in a hard choice. It doesn't make that improved job now better than the East Coast job. It's better than it was before, but it doesn't seal the deal. Say we're going to raise the salary of your West Coast job by a thousand dollars a year. One job is better than the other in some respects, but it doesn't seem like one of them is at least as good as the other. Suppose you've got the one career on the West Coast and the other career on the East Coast. On how to know you're facing a really hard choice, or her "small improvement test" Highlights from our conversation are below, edited for brevity and clarity. That's when the hand-wringing kicks in.Ĭhang can't tell you what choice to pick, but she can give you useful strategies for thinking through those choices. "One alternative is better than the other in some respects the other alternative is better than the other in other respects and neither seems at least as good as the other, overall," says Chang. What makes a decision hard, Chang notes, is when the two choices in front of you are on par. You get an operation that will cure some debilitating disease you have." That's an easy decision. "Some of your big decisions, while life altering, are perfectly easy. One of Chang's research areas is decision-making. "It's really important to distinguish big choices from hard choices," says Ruth Chang, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. Do you take the new job? Break up with your partner? Move closer to your parents? Start a totally different career? Being faced with a big decision can be overwhelming.
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