Sept 24, 2019

In college I majored in Philosophy. Now there's not a whole lot you can with a Philosophy degree and my two main options were to either become a professor or a lawyer. Both required going grad school and as graduation neared, I was completely unable to make up my mind and ultimately, I ended up missing the deadlines to apply for grad schools. This left me adrift, with no where to go and is one of the many examples of dumb and irresponsible things I've done.

Why did I struggle so much to make a decision? And is there something I can do to make better and more decisive decisions in the future? I'm Daniel Lam and this is Inner Monkey.

While trying to decide if I wanted to be a lawyer or a professor, I learned a lot about both that worried me.

Turns out, being a lawyer is very different than what I've seen on TV. I would likely spend a lot of my time doing tedious research and much less of it giving the impassioned speeches I thought all lawyers give.

What I learned about becoming a professor wasn't much better. Completing a doctoral program would be a lot of work. And even if I made it through, I'd likely have to move to the middle of nowhere, to find a decent job.

Since neither option was stellar, I had a genuine fear of locking myself into a life that I might not want. My inner monkey just couldn't make that commitment with so much hanging in the balance. What if I hated it? What if I regretted this decision for the rest of my life?

I was terrified of making the wrong choice, and in the end, that fear is what prevented me from making any choice at all. I floundered and delayed until I missed the deadlines to apply for grad schools and the decision was taken out of my hands.

In a strange way, I was relieved. I couldn't choose the wrong path anymore, because they were no long an option. But what was my plan now? I had no plan. I just tried not to think about it. and spent that time hoping it would all magically work out somehow.

Looking back, I see that I had put too much pressure on my inner monkey, and he just couldn't handle that much responsibility. I can't really blame him. The decision he was faced with, was pretty big. At only 22 I was expecting him to make a decision that would affect my life for longer than I had been alive. Who wouldn't be worried about a decision like that. If only I could be sure the choice I'd make was the right one.

In a perfect world, where I'm omniscience and have all the knowledge in the world, I could make perfect choices. But that's not the world I live in, and I'm not omniscience so there's no point thinking this way.

All I have to work with, is the flawed and limited information that's available to me. And from that, I need to make the best choices I can. Sometimes, that means I'm going to be wrong, and I need to find a way to make my inner monkey OK with this.

The real issue here, is the pressure and responsibility I put on my inner monkey. He's really bad with handling either of them. He has commitment issues cause he doesn't want to feel trapped when things go bad, and since no one can guarantee something will be great forever, he wants to keep one foot out the door, at all times. The more pressure and responsibility he has, the more he wants to run away.

When exploring a maze, I expect that most of the paths I go down will be dead ends, but the only way to find the path out, is by exploring the unknown paths in-front of me. As I go down each path, I collect more information, and I can use that to help me make better decisions about where to go next. I don't get upset when I hit a dead end because instead of focusing on the wasted energy of choosing the wrong path, I'm focused on using the new information I've gathered to help me pick the next path.

This is how I need to get my inner monkey to think about the decisions in my life. He shouldn't be trying to figure out how to escape the maze before he's even stepped inside, he should be focusing on gathering more information and using it to help me get where I want to go.

If big, important decisions are the problem, then I need to turn them into small, insignificant ones. While grad school has the potential to affect the rest of my life, it doesn't have to. Sure, it wouldn't be ideal if I went to grad school for a couple years and then decided not to finish. But if I was really struggling and I felt like this really wasn't working out for me, that's like finding a dead end in a maze. And in a maze I wouldn't give it a second thought. I'd just turn around and go back the way I came.

And for that matter, if my Philosophy degree only lead me down paths that seemed like dead ends for me, I'm not trapped in this part of the maze. I can just go back.

In fact, instead of being OK with going back, I should be planning for it. Since my decisions are always based on imperfect information, it only makes sense that I should expect to encounter lots and lots of dead ends.

Instead of looking for a guarantee that I would like being a lawyer, I should've kept going down that path just so I could find out where it leads. Maybe I would hate it and if I did I could just turn around and give something else a shot. But because I never went down that path, I have no idea where that would've lead.

My life is where it is because of the decisions I've made and the paths I've chosen to go down. Most of them have been dead ends, but there's no point wishing I could turn back time and do it again. All I can do is look ahead and use the information I've gathered from all those dead ends to help guide out of this maze, and towards living the live I want to live.