I am finding it unusually hard to write at the moment. Not sure why. It might have something to do with the fact that I’ve spent all week (and then some) trying to make a decision, and all that thinking is jammed up in my craw and wanting to get out onto the page. But I haven’t made the decision yet, and it’s a “big” one, so how can I talk to you about it without tilting the scales? Which would be bad, of course, because then some sort of social expectation pressure might lead me to make the wrong choice. You don’t want me to make the wrong choice, do you?
Related to this, I’ve been thinking a lot about decisions lately—what they are, when they come up, whether they are correct in their insistence that something awful will happen if they don’t get made. I’ve decided, just now as I’m writing this, to share some of my recent thinking with you (which is a euphemism for thinking it, while you watch).
The verb “decide” derives from the Latin dēcīdere, “to cut off, to cut down, to mark out…” (OEM).
We could contrast this with “choice.” Choosing and deciding can seem interchangeable, but if you look closely there are some important differences. This entry from the Online Etymology Dictionary is really pretty amazing.
Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to taste; to choose." It forms words for "taste" in Greek and Latin, but its descendants in Germanic and Celtic mostly mean "try" or "choose." The semantic development could have been in either direction.
It forms all or part of: Angus; choice; choose; degustation; disgust; Fergus; gustation; gustatory; gusto; ragout; Valkyrie.
It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit jus- "enjoy, be pleased;" Avestan zaosa- "pleasure," Old Persian dauš- "enjoy;" Greek geuesthai "to taste;" Latin gustare "to taste, take a little of;" Old English cosan, cesan, Gothic kausjan "to test, to taste of," Old High German koston "try," German kosten "taste of."
So yeah, “gustatory” shares a root with “choosing.” To describe a medium-rare Angus steak as “choice” is to bring distant cousins within make-out distance—never would have guessed.
Now taste these two nearly identical sentences:
“I decided to ask her to marry me.”
“I chose to ask her to marry me.”
The outcome is the same: a proposal. But the flavors are different. The first version subtly suggests an action arrived at through a deliberative process. The second suggests an action that flowed forth in a simpler, firmer or more direct way, like water from a spring. In the first version, we suspect that the speaker may have first spent some time considering not asking her to marry him. In the second version, that possibility doesn’t come to mind.
To return to the etymological roots: Decision involves cutting something off—some other option or set of options—and working with what’s left. Choice is in the same thought-space as putting something in your mouth and chewing it and making it a part of your body. These are in fact remarkably different metaphors, suggesting two very different approaches to situations and to life.
A few weeks ago I was listening to the Art of Accomplishment podcast, a show that in my best reading sounds a lot like Buddhist tantric theory of emotions via a pragmatic Dzogchen-like view1, in a package designed to appeal most to salespeople and busy execs (thereby usefully fucking with some of my unexamined presuppositions about how certain ideas and practices are supposed to sound and who they’re supposed to be “for”). And I heard the guy, Joe Hudson, say something that’s been rattling through my brain ever since, which was something like, If you feel you’re making a decision, you’re always operating from fear.2
This had some immediate resonance. And the truer I acknowledged it as being, the clearer it became that I have been suppressing enormous amounts of fear. Ever since high school, I’ve been setting aside pockets of time to “make decisions” probably multiple days most weeks. I learned to write largely from trying very hard to work out moral and practical dilemmas to myself in journals (a good example of how earlier stages in development can bootstrap capacities useful in later ones, if one wants to apply that sort of lens). In retrospect, it ought to have been more suspicious that these decisions so often had exactly two prongs—why only two?—but, I don’t know that it usually was.
What is Joe talking about? It seems like the easiest way to get at it (following his example) is by pointing at all the things we do without ever seeming to decide. You, sitting there, are reading and processing these words—no felt decision there, right? You’re breathing—no decision there. You navigated into the space and the physical position you’re inhabiting—maybe you had a moment of deciding on the destination, but you probably didn’t have to decide how to puppeteer your individual limbs. All that happened without deliberation.
(It’s revealing to look at the situations in which we feel most compelled to “make decisions.” In my experience, I tend to be alone and not currently engaged in dynamic activity; I’m likely to have skipped exercise; and the thing I’m deciding about is almost never directly or richly present. It always seems to come down to a form I have to fill out, an email I have to send, a person I’m not presently communicating with. One could draw from this a prediction that frequency and duration of deciding increases as affordances for direct environmental and interpersonal connection decrease, i.e. as life becomes more mediated by symbols and “frictionless” design.)
I’m thinking what triggers decision-making is essentially distrust, which, if you can work back through the sedimented layers of avoidance, is usually rooted in fear. It’s easier to feel distrustful when the environment isn’t giving you meaningful feedback; maybe I don’t really love my partner is a different proposition when you’re alone and combing your memories than when you’re looking at the partner and they’re smiling back at you. It’s easier to feel distrustful when you aren’t taking in environmental feedback—when you’re afraid to look into your interlocutor’s eyes because what if they’re coldly judging you. And, it’s easier to feel distrustful when—and this is really the big thing, the root dynamic I think—there are categories of experience (i.e. feeling, emotion) that you consider unacceptable to experience, and therefore have to be repeatedly scanning the horizon for lest the path you choose might eventually lead you there.
The irony is that the feeling you don’t want to feel is already here and happening—it’s the very thing that triggered this anxious scanning of the horizon. So really you—and I mean I—am trying to avoid something that is already happening, instead of just accepting and feeling that I’m scared, confused, uncertain. By avoiding these feelings (which the labels always distort in one way or another) I ensure that they remain sedimented in my system indefinitely instead of transforming into something else.
In an earlier post about the Option Method I talked about fear-motivation as essentially a form of herding—one sets up and attends to frightening possibilities in such a way that the overall organism ambles in the direction of something not-that-terrible. I’m only just making the connection between herding and deciding—again, “cutting off”: which is what sheepdogs do when they sense the flock is headed somewhere it ought not to go. Following this metaphor, we could even say that decision, in this limited sense, is the mechanism of fear-motivation. We decide in those instances where we find ourselves moving toward something fear-inducing.
Some major downsides of this strategy are:
Fear is really hard to differentiate from excitement and joy, so those end up triggering decision too, and getting cut off.
Models of what’s worth fearing tend to be outdated and wrong (especially in times of rapid cultural change, when the things you were taught to be ashamed of as a child no longer have the same consequences by the time you’re an adult).
The process of decision-making, phenomenologically speaking, sucks. I think this is because we seem to have no good way of cutting off possibilities without cutting off the sensations we imagine might lead us to pursue those possibilities. And cutting off sensations makes us feel numb and divided against ourselves—I think we always sort of know it’s happening and resent ourselves for it. (Just think back to the last time you were in an intense decision-making phase: didn’t it have a character similar to when parents or teachers told you there was something you weren’t allowed to do, some way you weren’t allowed to feel?)
So what’s the alternative? What’s “choice”? I don’t obviously know, man, but one answer I’ve been playing with is that choice is simply consciousness, or what John Vervaeke describes as the process of “relevance realization,” wherein the relative importances of various sensory phenomena are expressed in a kind of holographic space. As far as I can tell, my conscious awareness is inseparable from whatever process bodies forth in my typing of these words, which is also inseparable from hearing my housemate turn on a vacuum cleaner in the other room. These things “matter” to me at the same degree to which they’re salient, or vivid, almost as if someone with perfect knowledge of my present interests had decided exactly how vivid to make them. In other words, this salience quality already seems to be an expression of choice. This sense of choice is so embedded in every pulsation of my experience, in its enactment or its inclusion, that it seems fair to say that choice could be one word among others for the medium itself. If decision is what I choose to do with or about my experience, choice may be that by virtue of which my experience is experienced.
In which case we could now suggest: Choice is that which decision-making cuts off.
How does that sound to you?
Now I want to tell you how, as I felt into my fears recently, inviting them into the living room so to speak, I discovered that one of the greatest and most radioactive was a fear that at some point years down the line I’d look back and realize that I had spent most of my life deciding about things without ever enjoying them. When I asked what was it that led me to expect such a thing, what emerged was a strong sense that this was precisely what I’d done with much of my childhood and most of my twenties, and was now making a good start on into my thirties.
To my surprise, the feeling behind that acknowledgment was not fear but grief. My youth, my real youth, was over, and I had spent so very much of it trying to conceptualize a right path that never could have existed, but the real sadness of it really was in fact just that it was over and I would truly never get it back, would never be that young again, would never worry a young person’s worries and decide a young person’s decisions again—and I realized I had been going around trying not to feel the way I really did feel about this for some time. So I let that in, and it fucking hurt, and I sobbed and rolled around on my couch like a kid who’s had the most incredible toy in the world taken away from him. But when the feeling passed through so that it was in every part of my body, at that point it changed and flared suddenly into appreciation and awe, that I’m alive and here to lie on a couch watching rain beat against windowpanes while another phase of my continuous discontinuity lets go of itself for the first and last time.
As I recall it occurred to me then that I was very, very hungry, and I went downstairs to find something else to eat.
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If I’m right about this (and I haven’t been able to find anything about Hudson’s practice lineage through Google) this would mean the Art of Accomplishment folks have some pretty close kinship with my online practice community, Evolving Ground.
It may have been this episode? But definitely in the same series: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-power-dynamics-of-fear-emotion-series-7/id1540650504?i=1000550102742