I was listening to Phuc Tran’s book Sigh, Gone, in audio version, and there’s a part in which he describes how his mother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, if I remember correctly. His parents, who are Catholic, up and decide to travel to the shrine of the newly-sainted John Henry Newman to beg his intercession. The mother is cured because the doctors find no trace of the cancer in her body in a subsequent appointment.

As I understand it, from Phuc Tran’s point of view, there may or may not have been a miracle, and either way, the Catholic religion was a minor key bass line in his growing up - underpinning everything rather sombrely. What Phuc Tran offers the reader is a delightful example of how this possibly Divine Intervention was but an anecdote in this story. This thing that people pray for, that people can literally die or live on, has no greater repercussion in someone’s life than eating out on a Tuesday at McDonald’s. Just imagine the opposite… that this poor immigrant family, recently come to America, does pray to John Henry Newman and that the situation is not reversed and the mother dies anyway. The author would be no more Catholic than he is today with the miracle having happened.

It strikes me that when it comes to desires, it is the immediacy that counts. It also seems to me that when it comes to decisions, our human nature wants two things: to avoid suffering and to feel right. Basically, a request for Divine Intervention is a request that says: “please do something!” But say that a an indication is granted for a decision to be made. Or rather, say that clouds part, a voice is heard, and a command is handed down: “get the vaccine” or “don’t get the vaccine”. Assuming that the instruction is followed, our human nature would then be all puffed-up with the idea that our adherence to the instruction made us good. Instead, the instruction-less among us have to stay humble, have to search for calm and find peace and follow their own heart and then, even more importantly, have to give up their idea of what is good, in order to accept and understand the intentions and actions or inactions of others. I think this is the greater challenge. It’s not making the decision itself. Rather, it’s accepting that, free to choose, there is no immunity to suffering and no guarantee for the future, and that our choice might never find universal approval. Furthermore, in the future, the immediacy of this issue will have disappeared and we will struggle to remember what it was that we talked about so much.

I think the subject of decision making is neat… Neat in the sense that there are, for it, a variety of strategies that can be employed and a variety of pitfalls to be avoided.

To be avoided:
- Drift
- Decision fatigue
- Regret

I think most strategies can be boiled down to a form of mindfulness. Take, for example, Stephen Levitt’s advice on a recent episode of “People I Mostly Admire”. He divides decisions into two categories: the ones in which you lack information, and the ones where you have lots of information. For the first, he advises to be wary of self-interested experts and find, instead, a friend or family member who has faced a similar decision, has done research or knows more about it than you, and follow their choice. For the second he imagines the outcome of both choices and aims for the one in which he would feel the least regret. If he is still uncertain about the choice to make, his advice, based on research, is “to take whatever path is the biggest deviation from the status quo” because people who have done so, who have made the biggest change, “are on average happier than the people” who haven’t. (You can listen to the whole explanation at 23:36 into the episode.)

Levitt’s advice is neat: count on someone you trust, imagine a future self in one decision scenario or the other, or take the opportunity for the biggest change.

The latter part of his advice seems related to one of Mother Teresa’s tips for humility… She wrote that when faced with a choice, “choose what is hardest”. I often think about this during the day. Faced with little choices, it’s in my nature to pick what is easier, what is lazier or more comfortable. But building up a tolerance for what is harder, or more uncomfortable, is more rewarding in the long run.

While there might be a tendency to look at decisions as a vast field of research, I’m tempted to look at decisions as a form of friction… Being mindful and observing the tensions that arise from the choices at hand is interesting!