Have you felt like recently you can’t make any decisions, or am I the only one? When it’s up to me to make a choice, even if there are only two options, even for the most mundane purposes, I feel a certain type of existential dread: a dread which grows as I weigh every. single. pro and con, eventually both sides of my list getting so heavy that I feel like I might drown. What if things go horribly wrong? What if one choice would make everyone else happy? What if I’m a weird idiot that is physically incapable of making decisions? Have I really thought this through? Would others have chosen differently? And, most importantly, what if I make the wrong decision? I end up frozen, stuck in a sort of stupor, paralyzed by my own indecision. Sometimes I’ll brave the dangers for a moment and pick something, only to backtrack seconds later, as the reminder of all the what-ifs flood back in, as I gauge the reaction of the people whom I’ve made the decision for. In the end, I’m exhausted and paranoid, and the people around me are probably annoyed at my inability to function. Why can’t someone else just make all my decisions for me?
I think this fear of making decisions (FOMD?) holds a power over me for two main reasons:
- The infinite possibilities and choices available these days
- My all-consuming personality trait that is people pleasing
I’m actually convinced that the overwhelming amount of choice we have these days is the bane of my generation’s existence. We must choose things about our life similar to our parents, but on an exponential scale. For example, they had to choose life partners as well, but they only had to find someone nice from the few hundreds of singletons in their hometown. Now, we have the world at our fingertips, everyone is accessible to us. It makes us wonder what we’re missing out on, what about all the other options? We almost never have to make a real decision, because there will be another one, just around the corner, as if we’re stuck in an indefinite limbo of decision anxiety. The same goes for jobs, cities we live in, friends we make. The world is our oyster, with everything (and everyone) becoming more and more accessible every day. But sometimes I wonder if that oyster is actually a scam, tempting me inside with its pearl of possibility, then clamping down and trapping me in the darkness of too many choices as soon as I step inside its shell.
And not only do we have access to a myriad of choices for the big life decisions, but now we have unlimited options for even the tiniest of things. Do you know that I spent almost 90 minutes reading reviews on amazon for the best toilet brush?! I kid you not. I had already filtered by color and size, and I still had hundreds of options. Even when I’d thought I’d made a decision, I scrolled to the bottom of the page and saw the ‘similar products’ comparison, as if I hadn’t already been through the internal struggle in my head already. (This might also stem from the fact that we’re forced to get everyone else’s opinions on the “right” decision, e.g. my last post on ratings.)
What do you want for dinner? There’s about five million options on your delivery app. What should we watch on TV? Forget the list of 10 regularly scheduled programs, you must now infinitely scroll through your 500 TV subscriptions and decide. Where do you want to go on vacation? Well, there’s about a million hotels you can choose from (if you can even choose a destination to begin with), so good luck, is all I can say. It’s all so… infinite.
Making decisions takes energy. It’s why CEOs are often stressed, even if they aren’t doing the nitty gritty backend work. The mental cost/benefit analysis, the responsibility if things go wrong, the closing of doors on things that might have been better. MAKING DECISIONS IS EXHAUSTING. And when every little thing takes this much mental capacity in our daily lives, it tires us out! Which is maybe why I feel like sometimes I can’t possibly make one more decision.
In addition to too many choices for myself, there are also other people’s opinions to worry about. I’m a self-diagnosed people pleaser. It’s something I’m working on, yet I can’t help but worry that something I’ve done has inconvenienced someone else. Maybe it’s because of the way society raises women. Or maybe it’s something Freudian about the way my parents made me feel bad for messing up. It doesn’t matter. I care way too much what other people think and if they’re happy. I know it’s no way to live, making sure others are pleased and putting aside my own wants and desires, but I recently realized it’s impairing my decision making as well. As in, I’ve spent so much time pleasing people that I don’t even know what I want or desire anymore.
My internal list of pros and cons has turned into a pros and cons list for other people. For example, recently when visiting Paris, I was selected to decide if we went to the Airbnb for the night to drink wine, or if we should go to a cocktail club. I stood on the sidewalk, speechless. My brain was trying to compute all the ways my two friends would react. If I chose to go home, would my buzzy friend be mad at me because she likes to go out? If I chose the cocktail bar, would the other friend who had a sniffle be mad because she wanted to sleep? And what did I want? I didn’t even think about it. If I had picked what I truly wanted, it would surely have been an easy choice. There’s only one me, one opinion to consider. But I have become so far removed from recognizing what I like, what I want, that I couldn’t do anything.
The problem with people pleasing and making decisions is that it ends up becoming, yet again, an infinite scrolling experience. Because you can’t read other people’s minds, you must imagine all the possible scenarios of how they might feel. It’s at least a little easier imagining scenarios for yourself, deciding what feels better to you. But trying to figure out what would be best for someone else without them telling you? It’s an impossible task, which is why it feels immobilizing.
The more time you spend people pleasing, the less time you spend listening to yourself. You’ll spend less time testing how different decisions make you feel, instead sizing up how others react to the decisions you made. Eventually, you become so out of tune with what you like, you can’t even judge if you like the decision you made. Because you get validation from other people, their reaction to your decision is the goal. If you liked something, if it validated your desires, it would mean nothing, because you don’t value your own opinion anymore. It will always be about other people.
Like I said at the beginning, Why can’t someone else just make all my decisions for me? Well, recently, they inadvertently have been. I’ve been letting everyone else run my life, which has actually turned out to be more exhausting than running it myself. If I made choices simply based on what I liked, I could save myself an immense amount of mental capacity, as well as probably ending up in situations that actually make me happy. And what if what I want isn’t what someone else wants, or what if what I decide upsets someone? … SO WHAT. You can only make decisions for your life, in the end. If someone really doesn’t want what you do, then they can decide to take a different path themselves. And if you do make the wrong decision (FOR YOU), then you’ll learn something about yourself, rather than learning something about another person. Over time, I hope this will lead to making better decisions, that I’ll figure out what’s best for me. Less lists will need to be made, more fun will be had.
Having learned a small lesson from my amazon toilet brush incident, when I recently needed to buy a broom, I went to my local hardware store, where they had 3 options. I only had to choose which was in my price range, I didn’t have to see anyone else’s opinions. I have zero regrets about that broom.
It's not you, co. 