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I love cats. I’d been idly keeping an eye out for a less allergenic breed, when bam – a kitten became available. Suddenly I had to decide whether to take the leap.
Even though I’d been considering cat ownership for a while, I felt anxious. I mulled over all the responsibilities: vet bills, stubborn allergies, years of commitment. One big sticking point was travel. Having a cat would be rewarding, but did I want it right now if it meant I couldn’t decide on a whim to book a cheap last minute flight to another city? Did I want to buy Fancy Feast, or stay fancy-free?
Making choices can be difficult when the options are not clearly better or worse than each other, said contemporary philosopher Ruth Chang in a 2014 Ted Talk. For example, should you take an exciting promotion that will consume your weekends? Should you have a child, which would reshape your identity and daily life, or remain childfree and preserve your autonomy?
Such options have different kinds of value but at similar levels, defying pro-and-con reasoning, according to Chang. How does one even begin to decide? Here’s what experts say.
Your emotions are valid data points
“In decision sciences, we have the ‘rational’ decision-making approach – the one where people traditionally weigh up the pros and cons,” and compute the optimum results, says Julie Gore, a professor of organizational psychology at Birkbeck University.
“The rational model is pervasive in economics, management theory, medicine, in all walks of professional life, but it’s limited because it doesn’t really explain everything in human behavior,” she says. No decision maker has perfect objectivity, and emotions can interfere with rationality in ways one may not even notice. Gore says: We can’t expect to be coldly rational when making decisions, but should rather incorporate our own feelings and “intuitive expertise”.
We should “identify our emotions and acknowledge the role that they play in a decision”, says Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist and author of Tiny Experiments. Probe your own motivations ruthlessly, Le Cunff says: “Am I making this decision because I am seeking validation from my peers? Is it because I want to make sure my parents are happy?” Feelings are a useful data point, just like any other factor.
There’s one simple way to figure out how you feel about two options. Le Cunff recommends flipping a coin to find out what you catch yourself wishing for.
Try (mental) time travel
What if we’re not sure how we feel? Try imagining yourself in the future, in a practice called future self-continuity. Studies show this can help us behave more ethically, develop healthier behaviors and be happier with life over time.
For my kitten dilemma, I might consider how life will look different 10 weeks, 10 months or 10 years from now. How do I feel when I picture myself with a cat – does that version of me feel aligned with my intuitive sense of a good life?
Le Cunff calls her version of this a “consequence cascade”. Visualize the potential impacts of a decision and ask yourself, so what? “I am going to lose my current level of freedom – so what? Am I willing to accept this consequence or not?” she says. If you still can’t decide, you need to find out what the roadblock is. Tracing where a decision might lead – and where that decision leads further along – can help reveal what’s really holding you back.
When I did this, I realized the real hurdle wasn’t occasionally having to hire a cat-sitter. Rather, it was remembering how devastated I was when my childhood cat died. Was I willing to go through that kind of grief again?
Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans suggest a similar method for envisioning big life changes in their 2021 book, Designing Your Life. Sketch out three different versions of your life five years from now: one where you keep doing what you’re doing, like living in your hometown and deepening your work and relationships there; one realistic alternative that you would enact if option one vanished, like moving to the nearest big city and choosing a new career; and what you would do if anything was possible, like relocating to Mongolia or abandoning work altogether to focus on artistic pursuits. Then compare them. This can highlight your potential, fears and desires.
Such planning can lay bare how we “moralize” decisions or tie them to idealized identities, Le Cunff says. You may unconsciously believe that choosing a risky, adventurous path would make you more interesting and therefore better, or that staying close to family means you’re more worthy of love. Ask yourself whether the underlying assumption truly resonates or whether it’s a script you have internalized, Le Cunff says.
Experiment with smaller steps
Before committing to a big, complex change, begin with a smaller element. This starts you off “from a place of curiosity” and “removes the binary definition of success and failure”, Le Cunff says.
For instance, if you want to write a book, try writing a few pages every day for two weeks and see how that feels, she says. If you want to become a community organizer, host a monthly coffee with your neighbors.
Running a short experiment can provide information about whether the challenging aspects of a choice feel like an interesting area of growth or something we’d rather not have to deal with, Le Cunff says.
Identify what you can control – and what you can’t
Better decision-making frameworks can’t fix structural problems. “The systems that we’re navigating are not set up for thriving,” says Jon Rosemberg, an executive career coach and author of A Guide to Thriving. Systemic barriers to success and endless capitalistic demand for more can leave us feeling like we don’t actually have any choices. For instance, it might not be possible to quit your job to carve out more free time for other things that matter. But especially when we feel trapped, focusing on what we can change is its own form of power.
Pay close attention to the big and small ways we do have agency, and where we’re choosing to surrender it, Rosemberg says. For instance, allowing algorithms to curate entertainment can prevent us from actively shaping our own preferences.
“Agency is a skill and it’s something that we can develop, like a muscle,” Rosemberg says. First, notice your narrative about the decision – say, “‘I can’t end this friendship.’ Then, ask yourself open-ended, non-judgmental questions: ‘Does this friendship make sense for me if our interactions leave me feeling worse?’ Finally, shift your perspective: ‘I would prefer fewer connections that feel more aligned.’ Whatever the decision, try to ascertain whether “the discomfort of staying the same is worse than the discomfort of changing,” he advises.
This process can be “a lot more painful” in practice than this tidy framework might suggest, but it can be very helpful, Rosemberg says.
Don’t fear the unknown
Decision-making frameworks assume you have some sense of what you want. But if you genuinely don’t, that’s okay too.
Many of us have “been told that a successful adult is supposed to know what they want,” Le Cunff says. This can cause misery. Yet periods when we don’t know what we want are completely normal – even something to celebrate.
Rather than trying to force a decision, Le Cunff suggests taking your time sitting with uncertainty: “Try to have fun and experiment.” Through self-inquiry, agency and narrowing down our options using practices like future self-continuity, we can transform impossible decisions into a path forward.
When it came to the kitten, I recognized that I want to love deeply, even though mundane inconveniences and great loss are inherent in doing so. And with my new pet sleeping soundly beside me, I feel like I made the right choice.
