Confronting My Choices Affects Your Life

Bear with me. I want to share with you a set of choices. Not a standard list, but options I have come across during our political and pandemic turmoil. I’m not dealing with all of them daily, but there are several I’ve had to wrestle with over the last eight months. They’ve become part of my routine behavior and determine how I look at myself and judge others around me.

Lately, I struggle with decision fatigue. I face near paralysis when selecting courses of action that need to move me forward. Choice overload keeps me in a constant state of indecisiveness. My mind processes endless decisions that lie between simple outcomes and complicated conclusions. Beyond the basic alternatives I’m accustomed to having in front of me, the following is a list we’re all confronted with as 2020 nears its welcome end. What’s different now for me is that these selections directly impact your daily wellbeing.

Mask or no mask; science or mythology; blue or red; gather or isolate; black lives matter or all lives matter; defund or expand; in school or at home; travel or stay put; Teams or Zoom; negative or positive; passive or protest; stand or kneel; close or remain open; layoff or furlough; vaccine or no vaccine; Pfizer or Moderna; progressive or conservative; MSNBC or Fox News; mainstream media or enemy of the people; conspiracy or reality; dine-in or take out; America or the World; Maddow or Hannity; concede or coup; wall or no wall; cancel or continue; boycott or buy; save or spend; eat or go hungry, inclusion or exclusion and even more impactful, hate or love.

I’m sure you’ll agree this is both overwhelming and incomplete. Given our circumstances, there are countless choices we’re dealing with based on our own personal situations. Still, this set is confounding enough to paint a picture of how my life now unfolds each day. Choices that have traveled to the front of my consciousness because of the world we now live in.

But when did my life become so complicated and fraught with passing judgment that there’s so little time to consider the fallout? I’m an avid consumer of opinion and news from various sources to ensure I remain balanced in my thought processes and decision making. As an average, middle-aged, married, suburban, educated white man, I know I come with my own set of biases. I try to remain open-minded and choose an empathetic view of the communities and people around me. I’m a firm believer that the more I appreciate a viewpoint diametrically opposed to my own beliefs and take part in repairing the world, the more confidence I have validating my options. I’ve become appreciative of how others process decisions and have an open mind when understanding what elements test fate.

I’m often confronted with choosing what’s comfortable for me from moral, political, professional, and personal perspectives based on a range of information that flows toward me from all directions. From fiction to fact, I try to bounce this data against my own value system since judgments arrive from family, employees, children, parents, and others who don’t even know me.

My choices used to be my choices. Private and personnel decisions for which outcomes affected a smaller circle of humans than they do now. My new decision set has consequences for me and everyone I’m six feet apart from and, depending on the situation, the people around them. Since when have my decisions ever triggered contact tracing? Some choices are easy to make, and others come down to life or death by the thousands.

There was a time when choices used to be simpler; sunscreen or baby oil? Mac or PC and the consequence ridden, “Would you like fries with that?” Decisions taking seconds are now replaced with ones that need bisecting of outcomes for the days or weeks ahead. While previous decisions used to take moments to measure, new conclusions take time and set up successes or failures on a scale that months ago were never considered part of my reality. Choices tend to repeat themselves daily. I find myself reevaluating options based on new information brought into the decision-making process from various sources around me. I’m not easily swayed and can analyze new facts to set up predictable outcomes the same way a regression model provides a more confident fit the more terms added to the equation.

What I find most startling is the realization that individuals wake up in the morning with minds so made up they’re convinced there’s no other choice for them than what they’ve adopted as their own version of the truth. And while intentions are comfortable within the confines of their own minds, they’re different than mine and the people I’ve chosen to associate with. I am often too optimistic and believe everyone has a kind soul buried deep within them, and have trouble believing there are good people who wake up predisposed to hate. Do they spend hours validating theories reasonable people have a hard time comprehending? And who is the absolute judge of reasonableness? Who am I to question the choices made and the processes others go through to make up their own minds? My choices conform to my own moral code, upbringing, and societal and religious norms. I’m hopeful these factors are all part of everybody’s transformative processes to help them sort out right from wrong. I want to think we all keep an open mind and remain willing to flex and bend as we continue to learn.

While you have similar ways of evaluating decisions with the same data set I have access to, we reach different conclusions. It depends on how the information is presented to us, from where it’s sourced, who it’s delivered by, and whether we choose to process it without bias. Nowadays, it’s challenging to find a centrist’s point of view that presents information without prejudice. What happened to normalized forums for a factual presentation that allowed us to make decisions without being spun towards one belief or another? What happened to civil discussion and the debates that brought people close to the center? A reasonable discourse based on facts that led to an opening up of perspectives. Those days appear to be vanishing, stoked by angst-ridden talking heads and political machinery on overdrive that force people to make choices in a vacuum that never existed before.

Verdicts have shifted beyond spoken word and debates displaced by rubber bullets and smoke-filled skirmishes. So deteriorated has the civil discussion of choices become that we now rely on mute buttons in the hands of moderators to ensure I have the opportunity to hear both sides. Opinion battles are now fought out online, contaminating our ability to discuss issues affecting my future. What happened to our intellectual capabilities to process differences between fact and fiction without our beliefs being swung around like a morally defective compass? Even our most fundamental democratic choices seem relegated to the highest levels within the judicial system. We’re led to believe our decisions get tampered with or worse yet coerced out of us by fraudulent schemes cooked up in the underworld kitchens of conspiratorial socialist radicals.

I keep telling myself I’m smarter than this, but should I be concerned that others will make choices that come down to the defamation of liberty or, worse yet, cause physical harm to others? Every day I now find I take more time to pause and think about my judgments. The more extreme the repercussions, the lengthier my internal debate becomes. I’ll continue to weigh facts. Listen to experts and try to appreciate all perspectives. It’s no longer two sides of a coin but rather the surface of a sphere on which answers tend to slide off before they’re reasoned with and committed to. My owner’s manual will continue to be my value system and norms that have been part of my upbringing. They are well aligned with my family, safe circle of friends, close acquaintances, and coworkers.

There will be more choices for all in the days, months, and years ahead. Some will be effortless, and some difficult. I will continue to have faith that radical outliers quiet their voices so we’re no longer wrestling with distractions that seemed unfathomable only a few years ago. The return to more straightforward decisions seems so far off, but my own questioning and doubt can no longer hinder my progress. It’s time to have faith in my own abilities to reason through my options, and I expect the same of you.

After all, our world depends on it. It may not be a giant leap to state that my life depends on the decisions you make. And my quest for the right answers impacts your wellbeing. I hope you struggle with your choices as much as I have because they’re not comfortable or easy. They take time, energy, and commitment. Do the right thing. And if you’re not sure, worry less about others’ judgments and more about judging yourself. Be concerned with the present and future and how one small decision ripples outward. When it comes down to love or hate, choose love. When it comes to life or death, choose life. And, should you come to a fork in the road, with abundant confidence, go straight through relying on your own moral intuition. But be aware that the dust you kick up will settle around others nearby. Make your choices based on what’s right for you and also for the world around you. There are only so many opportunities to repair the damage. I will continue to be very careful with my new choices and ask that you do the same with yours.