Flex_ Do Something Different - Ben [47]
It is clear that making the right choices in life is important. We make thousands of ‘choices’ every second, although only a few of these surface to greet us in conscious thought. Even fewer, if any, change what we do, because of the powerful force of the past and our habits. Decisions – and the thoughts and behaviours that result from them – fundamentally affect our emotional or inner lives, they determine our short-term behaviours and the responses we get from others, they determine our value and worth in the eyes of others too, and they shape the longer-term course of our lives.
It seems a little odd, therefore, that in the main we let many decisions just happen. That we end up somewhere, in a job, a home or even a relationship, without really ‘knowing’ how we got there. Or that we allow our decisions to be made for us by our habits.
We pay most decisions scant attention, even though they appear to make the difference between success and failure in our inner and outer worlds. It seems that the only times we agonise about the choices we make is when we are choosing which TV channel to watch, whether to go out, which car to buy or where to go on holiday. Most of us fiddle about with decisions in the ‘middle ground’ where habit in any case has the trump card. We often neither think about nor notice the many small decisions we constantly make. And we sometimes fail to question the ‘big’ decisions about such things as religion, the nature of the universe, whether an alternative lifestyle would be better, or what we can control and change. We remain unaware of the vast number of choices that we actually make. Perhaps we prefer not to be reminded of our responsibilities to ourselves because then we would have to choose to take the praise and the blame in equal measure.
People often feel they do not have agency in decision-making – for example, they think things are predetermined in some sense (it’s in the stars, the Gods, the genes…) and that the illusion of control means we can do nothing of any importance to change material things. This is partly why the constancy of self-responsibility plays a key part in FIT Science. Self-responsibility can give us agency even when we feel we do not have it.
But this sense of a lack of agency in decisions is interesting for another reason. The choices that affect us do get made, even if we are not aware of them, even if we choose to ignore our role in making them, or even if they are automatic. Someone or something will decide for you if you do not decide for yourself. If you let this happen then the outcome may not be coherent for you. You may choose not to actively engage in the choices you make but that would make sense only if you are happy to put up with the consequences that follow. You may be unaware of some decisions you make, since they happen habitually or outside of awareness. It may be possible for a person who is like this to be coherent but they would be laid back and fatalistic in the extreme. They would not complain, or have desires, negative thoughts or any real conscious direction. In essence, this is rather animalistic and not taking advantage of being human. In reality, people are not like this as a whole, except perhaps in some small areas of thought or action.
54. The myth about decision-making
We want to stress two key points about decision-making in the next sections.
First, that there is a myth that cloaks decision-making. The myth is that people face many choices and that decision-making is difficult.
And second, that ‘better’ decision-making is really all about becoming coherent as an individual, and that can be achieved through DSD.
First, the myth that people face many choices and that decision-making is difficult. In fact, there aren’t many real decisions to be made. Actually people often make a ‘category