When It’s Extremely Hard to Choose

A significant and intense chunk of our lives may be spent pondering ‘hard choices.’ Should we continue in our relationship with X or part from them to see who else we might find? But what if we land on no one better? Yet what if we stay and the relationship never improves? Should we buy this property that’s beautiful but worryingly close to the railway tracks? Or should we buy the other one that has less charm but might be quieter? Should we accept this job that has prestige and the possibility of a stellar future? Or should we stay where we are because we love our colleagues and have a high quality of life?

Part of the agony of choosing at such moments is that we are in the background consumed by the idea that the ‘wrong choice’ may prove appalling in the extreme and the right choice a route to exceptional fulfilment. 

But we are perhaps suffering unnecessarily and might find reassurance in the strategic use of two kinds of thinking, alternately optimistic and pessimistic in tone. To trial the former, we might propose that part of the reason why certain choices feel so hard is that all options on the table have – in truth – something to offer us. The choice is only ‘hard’ because we are having to pick between substantially decent alternatives. We cannot choose because the choices before us all have a lot to offer us. If we stayed with X, there would be much to celebrate. And if we went off and found someone else, they would have many charms too. As for the two homes we are judging between, both are really very pleasant in different ways. And the same holds true for our jobs. Whichever option we choose, we will have much to be pleased about.

There is equal comfort to be found by running the argument in a pessimistic direction. We are obsessed by the idea that a wise choice will help to prevent a nightmare, but considered soberly, there will be something pretty difficult about every route we take. We are finding it hard to choose because all options have their unavoidably disappointing dimensions. X partner can certainly be annoying; but so will Y partner. Pretty much anyone we end up with is going to have their dispiriting sides. There is no dodging the inherent difficulty of everyone. As for property, no house can ever make life perfect. A lot of unhappiness will be ours wherever we happen to sleep. No house can spare us certain fundamental agonies of existence. Similarly, the dissatisfactions we know in our present job will have equivalents whatever job we pick. In other words, everything is certain to be a bit awful – a truth we are vainly striving to deny in our furious search for the ‘right choice’.

What powers the pain of choice is to a large extent an illusion: the idea of a single solution that can either conclusively deliver happiness or skirt unhappiness. We are exaggerating our agency. Once we recognise that by the time we are spending hours on a choice, anything we choose will be both pretty fine and simultaneously stubbornly somewhat awful too, we may cease to grow either quite so exercised or so terrified. We can afford to rest more easily. We are never far from pain; and we are never far from joy. We might let a roll of the dice decide the rest.