VALUES AND TRADEOFFS
You may ask, “What is a little and a lot, though?” Well, it depends on what you value. In fact, this is why, if you’ve read my work for a long time, I’m constantly harping on personal values.
Most propositions in life are not as simple as my coin-flipping game. Most are confusing and subjective.
Is giving up your social life for a year worth continuing your education? Is buying a house worth living on a tight budget for the next ten years? You have to know what is important to you to make those decisions well. An obviously good decision for me might be a terrible decision for you, and vice versa.
Our values determine how we measure the options in our lives. They are the yardsticks that determine the size of our costs and the size of our benefits when making our trade-offs. And if we don’t know what yardsticks we’re using, then we can’t accurately determine what is good for us and what’s not.
This is the true problem of people who suffer from indecision: they don’t know what they care about. They don’t know what matters to them. They haven’t found something larger than themselves to commit themselves to. Find your cause, find your values, discover the costs and benefits of your actions, and taking action becomes infinitely more simple.
Now, you’ll probably notice a pattern with the examples above. Good decisions tend to be difficult to make for some reason. Even when they’re obvious and we know they are good decisions (which is not always the case), we still struggle to make them.
And conversely, bad decisions seem incredibly easy to fall into. Why is that? Why do we knowingly do things that are risky and bad for ourselves and struggle to get off our asses to do one good thing? Why do we seem to suck at this whole thing called “life?”
If you said it’s because we’re all a bunch of blithering idiots… well, you’re not totally wrong.