How Plinko Represents Your Life Decisions

Why I Don’t Sweat the “Big Stuff”

Hello. I had a thought a while back, and that thought was about decision making. How is my life affected by the decisions I make? We hear all the time (or at least I’ve heard this a lot) about how we need to think carefully about all of the “big” decisions in our lives. Perhaps it’s whether we choose to begin pursuing a career or continue on to higher education. Or maybe it’s whether you should propose to your partner or break things off with them. It could be choosing to remain in the place you were born and raised or conversely it could be choosing to settle in a place for a while since all you’ve known is life on the move. Whatever it may be, we are always told that these are important moments that determine the course of our lives and therefore require our utmost attention and consideration.

But I don’t believe that is true. Of course I’m not going to dispute that these decisions don’t have an impact on our lives, but what I would like you to consider is the importance we place on certain decisions. I believe that there is no such thing as a “big decision” because I argue that every single decision we have to make in our life is a big one.

Consider the game Plinko. Never heard of it? Oh don’t worry about it. It’s a game played on the television show The Price Is Right, where contestants drop a Plinko chip down the Plinko board and collect whatever prize their chip lands on. Here’s a picture.

As the chip falls through the board it hits pegs which force it to move left or right until it finally reaches the bottom. It shouldn’t (hopefully) be too difficult to see how this mimics a simple decision making process. Should I wear a hat today? Yes! Do I need to buy groceries tonight? No!

But what interests me about Plinko is how it can really represent the summation of many decisions. Even if you dropped the chip at the same starting point, the path that it takes to the bottom varies every time. If the chip falls the opposite way at even one of the pegs, the entire trajectory of the chip can be changed. Ok it might not change that much, but Plinko is merely a simple binary analogy for your life and the choices you face. Every single decision you make in your life has a ripple effect on your future. In much the same way that the Plinko chip falling to the left where before it fell to the right can change the entire trajectory of the chip, even landing it in the $10,000 slot when before it landed on $0, so too is your future constantly being shifted by things that you might consider to be insignificant.

On one hand this might seem rather depressing. Most of us would like to think that the decision to take one route to work as opposed to another is a trivial matter having little to no impact on our life, especially far into the future. But it can. And it does. Consider this video, specifically 2:25 t0 4:05.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dLU6fk9QY

However there is another way to look at this, and as I stated at the beginning, that is by treating every single decision you make as an important one. And why shouldn’t we be treating our decisions that way? Human beings are unique in that we have the cognitive power to realize our own mortality. We can effectively see into the future. Unlike the Plinko chip that simply falls at random, we have the ability to make choices. Your future is constantly unfolding before you in every decision and every choice you have to make. This realization, at least to me, is far from depressing, because you are the architect of your own future.

So…what’s next?