David R. MacIver's Blog
Choosing what to do
This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/choosing-what-to-do.
Hi everyone,
Welcome to the inaugural paid newsletter post! I haven’t yet decided exactly where to go with these yet, but likely many of them will be a bit more personal and work in progress than most of what has appeared on the newsletter so far. Closer to things like Why am I not working on my PhD? and its evolution into I quit my PhD where I basically do therapy on specific problems I actually care about, in useful and generalisable ways.
Appropriately enough, today’s post is about trying to figure out what comes next now that I’ve quit my PhD. I have no good answers for this yet other than my traditional approach of “fuck around and find out”, but it seems like a good opportunity for me to figure out what to do with my life and I thought you might find some of my working illuminating.
What should I do?
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.
(Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll)
A generalised version of the Cheshire Cat’s claim is “If it doesn’t matter to you what happens, it doesn’t matter what you do.”
This is obviously true.
Unfortunately, this also means that if you want what you do to matter, what happens has to matter to you.
Do you ever write something and just immediately feel called out by it? Because that definitely just happened to me.
Why do we want what we do to matter? Well it doesn’t feel very good when it doesn’t.
If your actions do not feel like they have significance, this can very rapidly spiral into a depressive state where you wonder about the point of doing anything.
In Matthew Ratcliffe’s Experiences of Depression, he characterises one of the key features of depression as a felt restriction on possibilities for action. Acting in the world feels impossible, the world stops being something you can act in in practical ways, and instead distant and impossible to affect.
I suggest that “nothing I do matters” does not feel very different from “there is nothing I can do” does not feel very different from depression, and depression is quite unpleasant.
Decisions That Don’t Matter
I am in some sense “very good at decision making”, in the sense that I am very good at the following sorts of decision:
I am good at recognising “forced” decisions and going along with them. e.g. people have been congratulating me on what strong decision making character quitting my PhD showed, but it was actually very easy: I just recognised that I couldn’t actually decide to succeed in my PhD, and skipped the six months someone else would have done of pretending that this was not the case.
I am good at making decisions where one outcome is obviously better than the others and any potential downsides are low cost or reversible. “Would you like to come to this event?” for example is usually worth saying yes to - the upsides are large, the downsides are low. “Should I prep for Brexit?” was another one.
I am good at making decisions that don’t matter all that much. In How to make decisions, I talk about how the baseline model of decision making is the coin flip - pick an answer at random and use that - and everything you do to make decisions should be an improvement on that. If the outcomes are all basically the same, it’s hard to improve on that. If the outcomes are radically different, it’s worth spending some more time on the decision, but below a certain level of difference you can just go on gut feel and it’ll probably be fine.
(There are also probably a bunch of other similar cases that probably don’t precisely fit this typology but are close enough.)
These are all very good decision making tools that I can heartily recommend getting good at. Many decisions are like this, and learning to decide well in those circumstances is genuinely very helpful.
Also, I am very good at arranging my life so that most decisions I ever have to make are one of these types. I recommend that one less, although it does have its upsides.
But one of the distinguishing features of these decision types is that they are decisions where you don’t have to care very much about the outcome. The decision structure is roughly:
Would you like to decide now or waste a bunch of time being unhappy first?
Would you like the good outcome or the bad outcome?
Heads or tails?
As a result, these decisions barely matter once you’ve identified them as fitting this pattern: Your decision structure is basically “Do I want to decide the right way or the wrong way?”. It is technically better than having no choice at all (especially for the case where you don’t have any choice but the bad way), but isn’t actually a significant increase in agency.
The problem is that some quite important decisions do not fit this structure. For example “Should I start a PhD?” does not (although some might argue it fits the “Would you like the good outcome or the bad outcome?” structure, not everyone would agree which way around that goes), because you have to actually care about the outcome of the decision in some consequential way.
For small decisions you can fake this well enough. e.g. I might have genuine preferences between pizza and sushi (I like pizza more, but my digestive system does not), but it’s a small one-off decision that doesn’t matter very much, so I can just pick arbitrarily. There might be some risks to saying yes to an invitation, but as long as they’re small enough I can ignore them and treat the event as pure upside.
For larger decisions, this works less well. “Sure, let’s give it a go and find out” turns out to be a poor attitude to go into a PhD with.
The Pursuit of Happiness
It’s not strictly true that I don’t make decisions that matter. It would be more accurate to say that the ways in which I allow decisions to matter is very restricted. There’s a two by two I’ve been using recently for explaining some motivational issues I have, that seems to resonate reasonably well with some people:
It’s very easy for me to treat “prevent bad thing from happening” as motivational, and it’s very easy for me to treat “this will make other people who I care about happy” as motivational, but it’s very hard to treat “It will make me happy” as a reasonable basis on which to decide in favour of something.
I can pull it off sometimes for short periods (“I did it because it amused me to do so” is particularly effective here, because I have so much plausible deniability about it actually mattering to me when I do that), but it’s not something I can sustain.
This is obviously not healthy and I do not endorse it as reasonable. Being happy is good. It is perfectly sensible for me to want to be happy. Sometimes I even am happy, and that’s good. I’m a fan of it. And yet, for whatever reason, when I try to treat the pursuit of happiness as sufficient motivation to act, it tends not to work.
Unfortunately trying to build a functioning motivational structure on the rest tends not to work either. I run into this problem time and time again, where longer term projects turn into obligations rather than things I want to do, and where if my only motivation is “prevent suffering”, the easy way of preventing suffering caused by those longer term obligations is just to quit, so I do.
I think this is partly the problem described by Radimentary in Pain is not the Unit of Effort: If you’re not happy, you’re not trying your best. Unfortunately I think my ambitions are often well within the scope of things I can achieve when trying my best, but at the moment trying my best is beyond me.
Existentialist Dread
A phrasing that kept trying to slip in in the previous section is that I need to be able to treat happiness as a valid reason to act. I think this is subtly wrong in a really interesting way, which is that people don’t actually do things because of reasons.
I tend to subscribe to the theory described in The Enigma of Reason, which is that reasons and reasoning (in the sense of explicit verbal logical arguments) have the primary function of explaining ourselves to others rather than deciding what to do. A reason for doing something is not why you are doing it, instead it is how you would justify your actions to someone else. You don’t do things for reasons, you do things and then construct reasons that you can communicate to other people if you so choose that “explain” why you did the thing.
I think if I try to inspect the underlying belief that prevents me from acting in the ways that I want to act here it ends up as a sort of two part thing:
I have to be able to justify my behaviour to other people or I won’t be allowed to do it.
If I admit to doing things for “positive” reasons (i.e. just because I want to), this is a highly vulnerable state that I will be punished for e.g. because I will be told I’m being selfish, I will be mocked for it, etc).
These are very much legacy emotional beliefs (cf Emotional Reactions as Legacy Code, Your emotions are valid but probably wrong). I can see where they come from, and they were definitely correct beliefs once upon a time, but they don’t really work as a good underpinning for a motivational structure of a self-directed adult.
Which, I think, means I need something to replace them with.
I think suitable replacements are something along the lines of:
I am accountable to others for the ethics of my actions, but not for the motivations for them.
To the degree that others punish me for wanting positive things, they can go fuck themselves. I am an adult who can choose who I associate with, and I associate with better people than that.
As a result, the only “reason” I need for doing something is that I choose to do it.
This leads me to an unfortunate and distressing conclusion… which is that I’m pretty sure that this is what Sartre means by “radical freedom”, and my next steps in figuring life out might have to be to read some existentialists.
I think I’ll start with the Very Short Introduction.