Making the Right Choice

Choices — Good vs Right

Life is all about choices. What we eat, what we say, what we do and the list goes on. We make thousands of choices everyday from some inconsequential ones to some which impact our whole lives and maybe a million others.

If you have ever had sleepless nights or chewed your nails before an important decision, you would know how hard it is to make choices. If you have ever been filled with dread or regretted the horrible decision you made when you were a teenager, you would understand how bad choices can haunt us throughout our life.

We make some good choices and some bad ones. Differentiating the good ones from the bad ones is simple. Those that bring us closer to our goals are good and those that take us away are bad. So why do we still struggle to make good choices?

Personally, I have always struggled with them. How do I ensure that I am making the best choice?

Hindsight is twenty-twenty so it is always easy to decide whether a decision is good once you have the outcome. Suppose you didn’t make the presentation for a meeting and instead took your family out to dinner and had a great time. Now if the meeting gets canceled then the decision wasn’t so bad but what if it didn’t and you get fired. You might argue that the decision to not make the presentation was always bad but what if I told you that you hadn’t spent time with your family for a long time and this was your only chance before you are out of the country again.

What we need is to strike a balance. That’s not new and we all know that. We spend all our lives trying to balance duties and aspirations. The “how” is the difficult part. The “how” is what keeps us awake at night and makes us bite our nails before an important life decision. Decision-making is always difficult for this very reason.

Historically, societies have tried to make decision-making easier by defining rules. This is where duty and ethics come in. Should you steal if no one is watching — no. Voila, you don’t have to decide anymore. People over the course of history have made billions and trillions of similar decisions and have formulated guidelines which are passed down to us as laws, customs, traditions and adages. These are the templates we are supposed to use to decide if a decision is right.

Most of the time this works fine. You need to make a decision, you use a template. Easy. That is why we can make thousands of decisions everyday without breaking a sweat. Some templates are passed on us by society as ethics and some we design from our own experiences as moral values.

The problem starts when we need to make a decision for which

• We don’t have a template for or the template that we have from society is outdated; and
• The time frame is big so we can’t do trial runs or use our other experiences

So let’s first look at how we commonly take these kind of decisions.

• We go to other people and ask them for help or we are still looking for a template.
• We try to use one of the existing templates and hope we are doing the right thing
• We do a detailed impact analysis of our decision vs expected outcomes and go with the one that we feel will result in the best outcomes

Most often, we do a combination of all three.

Now, the problem arises when we have competing goals. Like the example above about the dinner vs the presentation. These create difficulties in our analysis models because we have to define weights which makes it difficult.

Making good decisions under such circumstances will always be hard but making the right ones shouldn’t be difficult. The difference between the right and the good is that the right is outcome-proof. Like if you always tell the truth, you don’t care about the outcome. You did the right thing and no matter the outcome you don’t feel guilty. This is also where the rules help us again, the decision may go horribly wrong but at least you did the right thing.

Those tough-to-take decisions without templates would be so much easier if we had some fundamental rules around them. Some rules do exist and in the following pages, we will be discussing those rules and try to come up with a rule of thumb that will help us take the right decisions if not the good ones.

Long Term

• “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” — John Lennon

Why is it so hard to make choices? If I had one superpower, I would like the ability to always make the right choice. Imagine how easier life would be

Let’s start with the goal. If we knew the fundamental goal that our decision needs to cater then it will be a little easier to deal with the competing goals.

Most people want to be happy so that is a good place to start. If the decision will increase happiness then it should be right one. While this is not a bad rule of thumb, it is however incomplete. I told my father that I wanted to be a cricket player because playing cricket player makes me happy. He said think about long term. Rather get a job in a MNC and you will have steady income and you will be happier.

So is the goal long-term happiness? Possibly. This is how I used to take all my decisions. Maximize long-term happiness. I studied what would land me the best job most easily, saved money so that I can go on expensive tours and diligently work for the next increment. But something felt wrong.

I got stuck in a cycle of trying to maximize my future long-term happiness but sacrificed my current happiness altogether. I was leading a miserable life because we live in the present not the future and my present sucked.

So should I try to maximize present happiness then? But what about what everyone says about long-term happiness. Surely, they can’t be all wrong.

We need to strike a balance between short-term and long-term. This is something everyone knows how to create that balance. Do we have any rules for that?

Unhappiness

Before we try to create a balance, we have to understand the nature of happiness’ evil brother — unhappiness.

The relation between the two is slightly asymmetric.

The absence of happiness is not unhappiness. If you won an award and fall down the stairs, you are both happy and unhappy. Yes, they cancel out a lot but not exactly. If someone in your family died, even the happiest thing can’t make you get over that unhappiness. There is an overlap for sure, but they don’t cancel each other out.

Happiness has a greater time decay than unhappiness. Happiness is more volatile in nature, think of it like an evaporating liquid, it disappears in the future and is elusive. Unhappiness is more like a piece of turd which sits there for a pretty long time. Suppose you want to watch a movie today, it is highly likely that the satisfaction of doing that now is much more than if you were to watch it a month later. Getting mugged now or a month later will pretty much bring similar unhappiness.

Therefore, unhappiness is an active player and not just the passive inverse of happiness and we need to recognize it’s role in our decision-making.

Conclusion — Happiness Now vs Unhappiness Later

We struggle with the balance because long-term happiness is elusive to understand. How many times have we looked up for something to be amazing but it has let us down? Contrarily, long-term unhappiness is much easier to understand. Starvation today will be exactly like starvation tomorrow.

Rather than trying to balance short-term happiness with long-term happiness, let’s try balancing short-term happiness against long-term unhappiness to make the right decision. If something will increase short-term happiness, how much impact will it have on long-term unhappiness. Since, we can ignore time for unhappiness, it is easier to compare since both are on the same dimension.

Let’s try with an example. Should I quit my job and become a stand-up comic?

Short-term happiness — I am doing something I love.

Long-term unhappiness — I don’t have money to pay bills and don’t have electricity.

If you value doing something you love more than you need electricity then go for it, else give it a pass.