The (impossible) art of decision making

Most of the decisions we face every day involve a certain of guessing, be it as predicting the future ("Shall I go to the swimming pool on Saturday or will it rain?") or as mind reading ("Did she really mean it when she said that she does not want to hear from me again, or shall I call her anyway?"). The uncertainty associated with these guesses drives most of our anxiety when making decisions, and indeed making decisions in a predictable environment are much easier, like finding a gift for a book lover: you might not hit exactly the kind of book they love, but they will certainly appreciate that you got the right "type" of gift. That is also the value of routine, where after a series of trials and errors you settle into a sequence of actions that work reasonably well, spearing you the effort of a lot of decisions every day. Conversely, when life turns into a chaotic mess, as is has done in the recent months by action of COVID-19, we are forced to re-evaluate our routines because many of them become plainly impossible and others just impractical.

Photo: Richard Croft

The second problem of making a decision is actually sticking with it. It is obvious that, if the situation changes, it is wise to check your calls in case the circumstances have changed enough to elicit a change of heart, but there are two types of persons who keep spending a lot of mental energy after a decision has been made. One the one hand, people with a perfectionist flair will tend to constantly re-evaluate their decisions in search of an even-better result, like when you are parking at the supermarket and you spot a better location, but on your way there you find another one which is even better; having to make three decisions to find a parking spot is definitely very tiring. On the other hand, people with self-confidence issues will constantly doubt their judgement and revisit their decisions, often teetering among two options, neither of which seems to be convincing, leading sometimes to situations of plain paralysis. 

I am an engineer, so I know how to strike a balance between perfection and effort, and most of the time I do not find myself in the first situation. I also have a healthy portion of self-confidence, so I do not normally show the second behavior either. However my ego is not iron-clad and there are occasions where I end up questioning my judgement for no good reason.

This afternoon we had the regular PhD group meeting, where there were a couple of presentations as usual, but then we came into the discussion of how the group is going to tend to the Bachelor and Master students, and that induced a lot of insecurity in me. All the other members of the group are either post-docs acting as assistant professors or full-time students, who live and breathe the campus feeling every hour of every day. Thinking of teaching lessons at the university simply gave me the runs. It feels strange from the comfort of my house, where I also have a lot of things to do, but once they are done, they are done,

Luckily, the teaching load is mostly limited to taking care of one student two hours per week for about three months, so that sounds like something I can do, even from outside the campus. Hopefully I will be done with my presentation and my online courses by then, so that my day job does not get affected. Let's see how things go. See you tomorrow!