the emotional, impulsive push that compels us
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
Watching a person get canceled is like watching stupid YouTube videos on autoplay until — bam! — your own face suddenly edges into the frame.
Because we’re all guilty, right? We’ve danced to R. Kelly, watched Manhattan, read Junot Diaz….
Isn’t it strange to think about how many of the things we were cool with growing up are kind of no longer okay? This isn’t a complaint — just an acknowledgement — and an odd sort of reckoning, as I try to figure out what to do with what I thought I knew. Because a lot of what I learned growing up — about who was worth my attention, which books were worth reading, even how I should define my own writing aesthetic — has been canceled.
One book I enjoyed reading that got canceled before cancel culture even became a major thing is How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. Have you read this book? Back in 2009, it was published to great fanfare. Then Jonah published his next book, in which it was discovered he’d fabricated quotes by Bob Dylan. At that point people started looking at Jonah’s older work and found all sorts of problematic issues with them too. Eventually, How We Decide was pulled from bookshelves by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Jonah tried to make a comeback in 2016 with a new book — which was panned by Jennifer Senior in the New York Times as “insolently unoriginal.”
Odd thing is, what I read in How We Decide still informs how I decide — or more accurately, how I think about how I decide things.
It’s taught me, for example, to value “rational” decisionmaking less. Did you know that if the part of your brain that handles your emotions gets damaged, you become unable to make very simple decisions — like whether to have lunch with a friend on Tuesday vs. Wednesday? When there’s no logical reason to prefer one day over the other, it becomes impossible to choose between the two, so you end up deliberating unnecessarily for a very long time, perhaps forever. We imagine that total levelheaded emotionlessness helps us make better decisions, yet without the emotional, impulsive push that compels us one way or the other — “Let’s meet Tuesday because I want to see you sooner!” — we can’t live our lives very well.
As a peripatetic nomad who’s just quit her job, decisions are something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
For example, how do I decide where to go next? Should it be a place I might want to live permanently, or a place with lower coronavirus infection rates, or a place I just want to see as a tourist?
And with that in flux, how do I decide what to do, work-wise? Do I go for another stable, well-paying, full-time gig? Or freelance part-time to keep things flexible? Or just take a break for a while and think about it later, when dwindling emergency savings force me to start earning money again?
I’m glad to have options, but the wealth of options in themselves can make decisionmaking difficult. Another book I like about decisionmaking, this time by a man who has not been canceled, is The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Did you know that the more choices we have, the more difficult it is to choose — and the higher the likelihood that we’ll put off the decision altogether? Given the choice between strawberry jam and grape jam, for example, most of us will quickly pick one and be happy with our choice. But given a wall of 200 different jams, we’re more likely to feel overwhelmed and not choose one — and more likely to regret our choice if we do (“I should have gotten the strawberry-fig, not raspberry-fig!”).
I wonder if that’s why some people never leave a place, or change jobs, or make any big, life-changing decisions at all. The possibilities for our lives today are so vast. How do you decide between all the lives you could possibly live? It’s easier to put off the decision indefinitely and keep autopiloting down the path you’re already on.
The overall effect of reading a bunch of books about decisionmaking, for me, has been to take the decisionmaking process less seriously and just — decide. Because in the end, can we even make better decisions? Whatever choices we make, some will turn out well, others less so — but either way we’ll do what we can to make the best of them. Even making a bad or “wrong” decision is better than remaining stuck in the depressive discomfort of indecision.
Perhaps there are no right choices. Or, more likely, perhaps every choice is the right choice.
What do you think?
Love,
Siel
3 links you might love
More affluence gives us more choices — but more choices seem to be making us miserable. Why? Barry’s book The Paradox of Choice tackles this question. I recommend both that and Barry’s TED talk.
Are we choosing to be happy or choosing to be controlled? Eva Illouz makes a strong case that positive psychology is “a new mechanism of social control”: “Happiness has become a useful strategy to justify implicit organizational hierarchies of control and submission to corporate culture.”
Are we all choosing to cocoon ourselves in a cozy numbness? “No one seems to want anything; there is no enthusiasm for desire in this culture, only the wish that we could give it up,” writes Kyle Chayka in this New York Times feature about nothingness.
I think you've just explained my husband to me... but seriously, I have the opposite problem. I can make big decisions without much thought when I feel as if I can't take any more. Is that desperation? Maybe. Another idea your post brought up for me is that often, there is good with bad. I've done some writing about how it is important to re-name spaces that are named for (usually white males) people who don't have great track records (read: understatement) with BIPOC or women. I find that the people who oppose the re-naming usually talk about the good things that person did. And they aren't wrong. Perhaps these conversations will lead to more nuanced understandings. The people/things/ideas that we characterize as either good or bad, black or white, are often a bit of both. In the case of renaming of buildings, spaces, roads, etc., we should think instead of naming things after communities or groups that had a positive impact or have survived after great struggles. We idolize the individual to our detriment, I think. By the same token, we should be able to appreciate an idea, and be realistic about the fallibility of the individual who put that idea into the universe. After all, that person isn't the only one who had the idea, and a community of some kind supported that person. Things I am pondering. Thank you for your post. :}
I absolutely love your Love Notes, Siel! In regards to making decisions, I have made all of my biggest life decisions from an emotional push. Some of these decisions were definitely very wrong, others were very right, but all of them took me on some pretty amazing adventures.
I hope your adventure will bring you to Iowa City in the future!
Wendy