Horse Latitudes

Adrift. 

No sense of what comes next. Goals are an abstraction, an intellectual exercise to give just enough meaning to some tasks to stay ticking, but... the one overarching thing, tying it all together? Not so much.

Back then, it was philosophically easier. 'Be better'. Earn more, eat better, experiment, meet girls, buy stuff, work out. Everything was easy because it was all incremental, measurable. Windfalls and gamechanging paradigm shifts were rare but possible windfalls. The steady climb continued. 

Now, it's a zero-sum game. Better in one means worse in another. 

What do you choose, how do you prioritize? 

Maybe ennui is an easy way out, because it sets a low bar. Just survive the day. Makes the work, the commute, tolerable. Seen in the context of what Life was supposed to have been, you'd just step off the train. If there are no goals, there are no failures to reach those goals, and life in survival mode... goes on. 

Where are the grand design plans, the one thing that can tie it all together - work, family, personal, social, financial, societal, self-actualization lodestar destinations?

Is this growing up? A mid-life crisis? 


Waiting. It's hard. 

Doing the right thing

Listened to a fantastic PoV the other day - there's so much information in the world, it can't be processed, it must be filtered. And with that filter comes bias. And with that bias comes an erosion in the nature absolutes. 
Which means, you can't tell what's the 'right' thing anymore. 

In the past, there were codes, defined and accepted norms of behavior. You knew what you were supposed to do, and so did everyone else. You knew what the consequences of your actions would be. If good, you'd want them known, you'd crow about them, and if not, you'd hide them behind closed doors and in the dark of the night. 
If you were caught, you and everyone around knew what was to be done - ridicule, reprimand, punishment, banishment, excommunication, execution. 

Now, it's all suspect. Everything seems to be serving a hidden agenda, or even just an overt one. Everyone is surrounded by people who tell him he's right, and if he isn't, finding the right people to agree with you takes minutes - even if they live on the other side of the planet and need Google Translate to understand you. 
Everyone's in a bubble full of their own farts. 

Knowing this, living this, how can you imagine anything you believe is real? Anyhting you believe is right, someone else things is wrong and vice versa, and they're right there to tell you. 

In the past, there was a 'done' thing, which wasn't necessarily the 'right' thing - by the standards of me, here, now, with my education, culture, class, and social background -

But it stopped you second-guessing. 

There is no right or wrong, and there may never have been. 
But there's always an is, and a not is.

And if it is what it is - how does it matter either way? 

Making Decisions

Ever since childhood, I've always had a difficult time deciding - for every pro, I'd counter with a con, for every positive there would be a negative, and I'd get fed up, switch sides, and it would happen all over again. 

I tried the list-the-pros-and-cons methods, but as you can guess, that was a brilliant exercise in creativity and self-justification and paper usage, but not much good as a decision-maker. 

Finally, I resorted to a technique I'd learned over 2 decades ago in class 6 maths. 

Weighed scores. 

And made a revolutionary discovery. 

Technique:

• List your choices down
• Assign attributes
• Assign weights to those attributes
• Score each attribute 
• Calculate the weighed scores
• Add up the weighed scores
• Sort by total score. 

Obviously, Google and Excel make this a lot easier. You can add on a lot of other stuff - looks (which I've realized tends to play a fairly significant veto role in decisions), brand name, etc - but ultimately, it boils down to how many attributes you identified, and if you got the information you needed for each one. 

The revolutionary bit, is that this not only lists down the decision, but also lists at the same time every possible justification you had for it, every possible choice you considered, what you felt was important, and how each compared to the others. Numerically. 

It also breaks down the task into clearly defined, simple, nibble-sized routine activity. Feature searches. Data entry. Formula building. Scoring. 

No big decisions, no brain-freezing infinite chaos of swirling possibilities. 

At any point, you can pause the decision-making by saving and come back exactly where you left off. 

It's... zen. There's no emotion struggling against logic, no tsunami hammering on an unprotected coastline. It's the order and quiet of a Japanese garden, a Roman irrigation system, currents through a semiconductor chip. It doesn't knock the emotion out of the decision, but instead channels it, into exactly where it is most appropriate and most useful - in assigning scores and weights. The rest, it's just maths. 

And if you don't like the end result, argue with the logic - and with a few quick changes, edit the scenario to match. It's not cheating, it's intuitive systemization. A large, complex system can go haywire with a small mistake; but that is clearly felt in the results, and can be traced to exactly why. 

There's no cognitive dissonance, no buyer's paradox. It presents you with a fait accompli, with an opportunity to change before you actually swipe the card. 

Heck, it even gives you a sorted, prioritized list of options!

And I've realized, it can be applied to any comparative decision. The only thing that limits yo, is the attributes - or possibilities - that you've considered.