Evolution of decision making

Hello hi, congratulations, you’ve successfully made a decision i.e, to click on this article. You should be proud of yourself and pat yourself on the back. Even though it took a fraction of a second, it probably took you years of practice to take decisions well., it’s no easy feat ya know? You’re constantly bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information but you’re still here, making one successful decision after another. Although some of them at your detriment, you’ve successfully made it this far.

Now that you’ve hopefully pat your back, let’s get to business. You’ve probably always wondered about all the questionable decisions people around you constantly make. Sometimes they’re so incomprehensible you wonder if they even thought about what they’re doing. I might not be able to completely help you decipher the reasoning behind their actions, but I can definitely show you through experience how my own decision making tools have evolved and how I now make decisions. These are some layers that got added into my toolbox to make better decisions.

Layer #1 of decision making — Narcissism and happiness

Think about this for a moment, the first time you ever made a conscious decision, you were probably an infant. I remember mine clearly, it was…..Sike, I’m kidding I have a pretty good long term memory and even mine doesn’t go that far behind. It was probably whether or not I wanted to give my chocolate away when my friend asked for it. I didn’t like chocolates but owning something felt nice, kind of nicer than watching my friend eat an extra birthday chocolate looking happy. I was going to put myself first all the way. I based my decisions off of short term happiness. For example — I derived some sort of sadistic pleasure from watching people get in trouble. I was the pet child, be it at home or at school. So, you bet I wrote up every kid talking in between classes. As a child, these small pockets of joy is what I lived for and made decisions to get them. However this lifestyle came to a crashing hault.

Layer #2 of decision making — Pleasing authority figures

My reign as the devil sadistic king came to a sudden hault when I fell in trouble with my parents. Although minor, getting into trouble with parents hurt me. How could I, the perfect evil-king-overlord-child do anything wrong? It felt shitty. It hurt enough to start optimising for avoiding the pain I felt. So I avoided everything under the sun that would get my parents/ authority figures to see me in the bad light. You might think, oh that’s not too bad. But my evil-king-overlord now made sure all my shenanigans fit in that little box my authority figures had created for me.The thing about trying to fit mouldable minds into boxes is that, once the melty young brain moulds into that box, it’s cemented. Good or not, that’s now your package to work with. Even in situations that box doesn’t make sense, it was the only tool I had to work with.

This is one of the examples of how I sabotaged my social life because my tool box hadn’t grown beyond “authority figures are always right”. Growing up in india means that you’re not “allowed” to date. (But obviously people still did) So when one of the nights my bestfriend gets careless and gets caught talking to her boyfriend by her mom. And I happen to visit her the next morning and her mom firmly tells me “come in, I have something to talk to you about” and she asks me if I knew anything about my bestfriend’s shenanigans. And I, having never lied to an authority figure in my life blurt everything I knew. The details don’t matter, what matters is I remember my bestfriend’s face dropping and being hurt by my disloyalty. That was the day I realized maybe doing everything an authority figure considered “good” wasn’t the best idea.

So my next layer for decision making was — maybe don’t make decisions that make you a social outcast

Layer #3 of decision making — Your peers are dumb but so are you

After me being a rat, it spread like wildfire at school and people didn’t actually want to be around me after this. Being alone in high school wasn’t fun. It made me understand the value of belonging. Then I went on the search to finding a group I belonged in and man, did I find one.

The only ones that wanted to be around me after that rat incident were people that thought that dating before marriage was a sin. Super fun-

Yeah, don’t worry mom, I didn’t do alcohol and drugs because of peer pressure. I did something way worse. I joined the bandwagon of the “no dating before marriage” cult and made sure every person that hung out with a person of the opposite gender was weirded out in my presence. Lol, there went my popularity.

And finally, in college I shed my “no dating before marriage” skin and dated people. My first boyfriend was a douche. And given my people pleasing nature from the pains of being a social outcast,I was a very “I will service my existence to my boyfriend” sorta girlfriend. Soon it came to burn my relationship and self-esteem. Talk about losing both kids to divorce. I realized two things after this relationship.

1. You can’t please a douchebag.
2. People can see right through you when you do everything in your power to please everyone around you. Here’s when I decided to give selfish-ness a try again after a long time.

Layer #4 Self serving might not be that bad

Navigating the world became more complex and easier at the same time after this. It became easier because I understood why people do the things they do — because they gave a shit about themselves. It became complex because do I optimize for my own happiness so I can live with myself? or do I optimize for someone else’s happiness so they’d want to be around me. This is where my black and white brain got super-fucked. Neurodivergent brains are just not made for the grey world. And oh man, was the world a million shades of grey. There were infinite choices that were so grey that you couldn’t even make out if they were more black or more white. Every situation and context was different from each other. If you wanted to effectively make decisions, you’d want to understand the context as much as possible. But even so, sometimes you make mistakes. And knowing it’s okay was one way to deal with. There’s also this inexplainable thing called instinct that guides you in your decision making. Tim Urban put instinct in a way that my science brain digs “It’s made from your ancestors making decisions, making mistakes and passing it onto you through dna and we call it — instinct”.

There’s always pro’s and con’s lists you can make. I have a friend that makes decisions using a a very detailed spreadsheet-

Is it overkill ? Maybe but atleast you’ll feel confident about the decisions you’ve made.

I finally reached a middle ground. This time I was not going to fully go ham and optimize my own happiness but also keep in mind that I matter too. Gradually learning to give and care whenever I can, because people are nicer to you that way and therefore, the world gets a bit easier to live in for you. But not so much that I’m in misery. Because people go and come but I do have to live with myself for the rest of my life.

Layer #5 of decision making — The third perspective

This will probably not be the end of layers to my decision making because there will be more as I go about my life. But here goes the ultimate layer :

We’ve all made a lot of decisions at the height of your emotions and regretted them. Anger, resentment and despair are extreme emotions that drive our decisions in ways that might not be good for us (it’s not all bad though, some of these are sometimes valid and are meant to be expressed) But something that has helped me not make drastic decisions when I’m not prepared to make them, when my tools are not functioning is “the third perspective”. It’s when you try to detach yourself as much as possible from the situation and look at it from the outside. And look at it as objectively as possible. I’m sure you’ve already heard of it but it is a hard muscle to master. And practice helps you get there. But something people don’t take into account sometimes is when your feelings are actually valid. Yes, objectivity helps but sometimes feelings help more in understanding what you’re feeling

Now that you’ve seen my life history, and in detail have understood how a person’s tools to make decisions have evolved (although I’m sure the way you or someone else’s way of gaining tools for better decision making might’ve been different). Why does it matter? What does this tell us? To put it in simple words, people make the decisions that they are equipped to make and the rest is a gamble.

For example : Let’s say you have to pick between ruacalyptius tea and strang coffee? And you’re not allowed to use google. You’ll probably take a blow in the dark and pick whatever. That’s exactly what a person is doing when they’re not equipped with the tools they need to make the best decision for themselves. They’re taking a blow in the dark.

Hopefully this helped you understand people that make absurd decisions all the time. And another thing I was hoping to do with this blog was to also make you question your own decision making frameworks, do they make sense or were they shaped by absurd experiences that you either steer towards (like peer acceptance) or steer away from (like pain of rebuked by your authorities).

P.S : ruacalyptius and strang are made up names. That kinda tea/coffee doesn’t actually exist :D I made up ruacalyptius and Glibert strang is a professor of linear algebra at MIT (cool guy, look him up)