Along the Way

In the holiday season we often find ourselves besieged by the necessity of making decisions. We are supposed to adhere to family traditions, some of which don’t really fit what we need or want for ourselves anymore. We always go to this place or that for Thanksgiving, we must bring the dish everyone assumes we will bring. We have to keep buying presents even for adult relatives, cause that’s what we’ve always done. The list is endless.

This a good time to think about how we make decisions. Most of the time we decide based on what feels right or what our significant other says we have to do.

Socrates said we should make decisions by asking questions, thinking about different perspectives and analyzing our own beliefs. That’s not bad at all. It’s certainly better than Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics who said every decision should be made by asking what a virtuous person would do in a given situation. Aurelius said we should give this kind of analysis to all decisions big or small. Personally, I think that’s a recipe for becoming severely neurotic. If we stopped to consider every action based upon a subjective understanding of virtue we’d be reduced to sitting in a corner whimpering with indecision. Life has to be simpler than that.

John Wesley said we should consult, in order, Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. One could do worse although some scripture would lead us to making wildly anti-social decisions. Tradition, could likewise, prove disastrous. Certainly our collective traditions of misogyny, racism, violence, and greed are hardly traditions we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren. That doesn’t mean we don’t apply Scripture and Tradition where appropriate but Whitman’s quote about “dismissing whatever insults your own soul” comes into play.

Seems to me, analyzing our decision making by some formula should be for the bigger decisions, not deciding what to eat for lunch or whether we buy one kind of soup or another.

Perhaps we can make a start on reasonable decision making with two questions, first of all, am I hurting someone else by my choice? Every major religion teaches us not to do things which harm others, not to do things which we wouldn’t want done to ourselves. That’s pretty simple.

The second consideration may seem to be a contradiction to the first. We should make decisions based on what is healthy for ourselves. From the perspective of almost 75 years I can attest that many of the worst decisions we make are made because we want to please someone else even though it’s a bad decision for ourselves. Quite simply, if a choice is bad for us personally, we ought to think twice about whether or not some greater good outweighs our own mental health. The answer is probably “No”. If a decision makes us feel badly about life we’re not likely to be increasing the greater good for those around us. Sometimes things don’t have to be terribly complicated.