
The Art of Decision-Making - luckysahaf
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/21/the-art-of-decision-making
======
ergothus
> Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you
> might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may
> simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive
> you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may
> actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.”
> These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of
> yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so
> redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem
> is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like.
> For Paul, there’s something thrilling about this quandary. Why should
> today’s values determine tomorrow’s?

I hate arguments like this, PARTICULARLY when the topic is becoming a parent.
Sure, you might become a new person and love being a parent far more than
missing the aspects of life you sacrificed to be there. OR you might hate it -
I have at least one friend that told me "I love my daughter, but I hate being
a parent" in a terribly gut-wrenching way. To say you don't know - that you
CAN'T know - what it's like to be a parent without being one doesn't mean you
should just shrug and give it a try. Ditto the same rationale for other
arguments - there are many things you can't know if you'll like until you try
it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to decide if you will in advance.

Of course you'll never know if you'll love being a parent, you won't know how
it can change you, and EVERY parent has moments of frustrations that are not
the same as regretting having a child/children. But if you become one, there's
at least two lives that can really really suffer if you hate it, so it's worth
dedicating some effort to thinking about in advance.

Finding parenthood worthwhile is a very very common state for humanity (for
good reason!) and most of us have benefited from that. But we shouldn't assume
that it will just work out that way, for ourselves or for others.

~~~
DewLines
I think you may be missing the point here. It's not don't think about whether
you should or should not and plan as much as you can accordingly – your
ambitions. I think it's actually don't expect you can know how you will feel –
your aspirations. And more importantly don't deterministically tell yourself
how you _should_ feel about what you aspire to become.

Allowing your aspirations to more flexibly become whatever the situation
requires is important. As described in the finish with respect to the time
between we aspire to do something and work toward those aspirations: > “what
happens in the meanwhile is also life.”

Life gets in the way, and as people we certainly can change for good and bad.

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themodelplumber
I was slightly surprised by the author tackling such a time-tested knot as
first-time parent decision-making and "OMG how do we make good decisions about
_anything_" decision theory.

But then I realized that in an existential periodical like The New Yorker,
there just can't be a final answer. More like some observations about various
points of view. Which is cool. But the strange definition of an "ambitious
parent" toward the end of the article does read a bit more like a misguided
knock on ambitious people in general, ever the clowns of the infinite-pie
existentialist world view. :-)

As a coach myself, I'm frequently in situations where clients ask me to weigh
in on decisions. While I'm happy to do so, even the best news from me--maybe
something like, "you are absolutely on the right track, and I know it, and I
think you do too" is not nearly as great as a different sort of piece of news:
The decision-making sphere _even after becoming a parent_ or making some other
drastic decision is so wide open as to be essentially incomprehensible. Our
senses so often tell us lies about our actual options. IMO this is why we have
cultural archetypes like Doctor Who. People who come in and show us that our
reductionist views and the resulting expressions of judgment are often just so
childish and self-protecting. Dive in! It'll be OK and we'll just keep working
on it. It's not like you make a decision and _then_ stop making other
decisions.

And that's another really important thing that's often overlooked in favor of
the decision-theory or intuitive spreadsheeting-weighting stuff: You can build
a personal model for navigating change. Using such a model, you will simply be
more bad-decision-proof on the negative side, and on the upside you'll be more
prepared to capitalize on good decisions.

In fact you can in many cases derive from that change-navigation model a sort
of time machine. Ziiip! The worst parts of the decision just got undone.
Parenting might seem unique in this way because you probably can't undo that
child--there's this new dependency that didn't exist before that now demands
your attention. But really, here comes Doctor Who! Look, it's a fascinating
new world, not a problem. And in balancing the needs of the subject (I don't
know what I'm doing!) and the needs of the object (wahhh!) there is an
incredible new world teaching us lessons that apply everywhere else.

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imh
I'm surprised to see no mention of decision paralysis. Hanging over every
decision is a meta decision of how much effort to spend in making it (and so
on, recursively). Given all the unpredictability the author points out, many
decisions don't get much more benefit from much more thought.

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dstrohmaier
People who are interested in this topic might want to read Richard Pettigrew's
"Choosing for Changing Selves":

[https://richardpettigrew.com/books/choosing-
book/](https://richardpettigrew.com/books/choosing-book/)

He offers a response to L.A. Paul and a way to choose in light of changing
selves. I am not sure how convinced I am myself, but it is very good
philosophical work.

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rrggrr
Ruth Chang has by far the best approach to decision-making I've ever heard.
Her TED talk is linked below. The key take away is determining first: "What do
I stand for". And, afterward putting all your focus and energy behind your
decision. In the end, if you lose, you lose. On that score I find Jordan
Peterson tremendously helpful, and also linked below.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choice...](https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choices?language=en)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP5ohTF4epE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP5ohTF4epE)

About parenthood I might add this... our brains are wired to minimize the
negative where our children are concerned. All manner of rationalizations,
identification, and denial works in favor of maintaining the parental bond.
Its more important to decide what you stand for, than it is walk in the path
of those of us so afflicted by the bias of being parents. It is great. It is
also brutally hard and in the end, one way or another, you have to let go.

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ThomPete
I always look at it this way.

Both parents and non-parents are trapped on their own side of ignorance.

The childless because they haven't tried to the experience of having a child
and the love that most feel.

The parents because they forget how it was to not have the obligations of a
child.

My personal opinion on the matter is that children are 49% horrible and 51% of
pure bliss and it's that 1% which makes the whole difference.

~~~
purplethinking
> My personal opinion on the matter is that children are 49% horrible and 51%
> of pure bliss and it's that 1% which makes the whole difference.

In my head I think of it similarly: the mean of the experience of living
before and after having a child is roughly the same, but the variance is much
higher after. Which side of the mean I'm on varies, and I honestly don't know
where it will end up over time. That's why it's so hard to know whether I
regret it or not. Given all the positive stuff (ya know, the unconditional
love and all that), I can never say that I regret it, but in so many ways life
is also just objectively so much worse now.

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ZenSystem
Do we have any real data on real-time parental happiness vs intentionally
childless folks? reply

~~~
SolaceQuantum
What do you mean by real-time here?

I beleive the prevailing studies are that parenthood is associated with less
joy but more meaning in life compared with _voluntary_ childlessness.
(Involuntary childlessness is not associated with increased joy or meaning,
and is more associated with increased loneliness)

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arisAlexis
I liked the first part but then simplified the reasoning of the article and
the philosophers it cites is: "there is no reason not to have children no
matter how your life is now or how yiu want it to be" which makes sense if the
author is trying deep inside to cope with his own decision.

