Choice !!

Do you know the most difficult thing to do? It’s making a CHOICE. Yes, it is. It is not at all easy when you have a thousand reasons and you have to pick between them.

In life, at every step, you have to make a choice. Since childhood, either other people or you yourself have been making them. Your school, your clothes, your food, your job - for everything, a choice was made.

There are always two things sitting there when you make one: should I do this, or should I do that. Those two questions always arise.

Which way to go? What to wear? What to eat? Where to go out? All of it has to be answered.

Why it is so exhausting

So you can see how difficult making a choice is. But I do not think the difficulty is really about the options. It is about what a choice actually costs.

Every time you choose something, you are also closing a door. Choosing one city means not living in the other. Choosing this job means the other version of your life quietly stops existing. Nobody talks about that part, but it is why even good decisions can feel heavy - you are not just gaining something, you are letting go of every other version of yourself that was still possible five minutes ago.

That is also why more options make it worse, not better. Ten choices means nine doors closing. The modern world hands us far more options than any generation before us and then acts surprised that we are all a bit paralysed.

Love the choice you made

The one thing we should all keep in mind is this: ALWAYS LOVE YOUR CHOICE.

No matter whether you made the right decision or the wrong one, once it is made, love it. That is the first step towards actually feeling happy about it.

One thing we should all accept is that there is no such thing as a wrong decision or a right decision. There is only one thing, and it is: love your choice.

I want to be careful here, because this can be misread. I am not saying every choice works out, or that consequences are not real. Some choices cost a great deal, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

What I am saying is that a decision is not right or wrong at the moment you make it. It becomes one, slowly, based on what you do next. The same choice can turn into the best thing that happened to you or the worst, depending almost entirely on whether you committed to it or spent two years standing in the doorway looking back.

The people who seem to make consistently good decisions are rarely better at predicting the future. They are just much faster at getting behind whatever they picked.

Once you commit

Once you start loving and respecting your decision, there you go. That is the step towards happiness and a journey towards a beautiful life.

There is a strange relief in it, too. Half the weight of a hard choice is not the choice itself - it is the endless reopening of it afterwards. Deciding once and then re-deciding every night is doing the difficult part over and over for no additional benefit.

So make it. Then let it be made.

So, choices are never wrong. It is our interpretation of them. It is our way of seeing it.

Fewer choices, better life

A practical closing thought.

If choosing is exhausting, the answer is usually not to get better at choosing. It is to have fewer things to choose about.

Decide some things once and permanently, so they stop being decisions. What you eat on ordinary weekdays. When you sleep. What you say yes to and what you never do. Those are boring commitments, and they free up an astonishing amount of attention for the few choices that genuinely matter.

Most people spend their best thinking on trivial decisions and then arrive at the important ones already tired.

-kashish