Open: Choices

I can honestly say at this stage in my life I don’t have the goal of being the end all be all in anything in particular. I no longer desire to be the best at something. As a matter of fact my M.O. is usually to excited about something, like so many hobbies I’ve had over the years that I ran hard for a few months and lost interest. Oh did I mention I definitely have ADHD? More on that another time I’d say, For now, we’re circling the wagons back to the point,

I no longer desire to be the best at a particular skill or trade, I am really just trying to make better choices. Then again, isn’t that what we all want, after getting out of the booze-drugfueled party carnival that was some of our 20’s that is. I make no bones about my bad choices. Most know I had 2 DUI’s (this was 10 yers ago), which landed me in jail and without a driver’s license for something to the tune of 6 years. It was 2 bad choices, but I can honestly say, while I never want to do that again, and shouldn’t I’m off the sauce for a few months now with no plans to ever go back to it, I did at least learn a lot from the experience.

If anything it taught me a lot about what it means to get around town via public transit, I paid attention in my DUI classes and used as a good opportunity to talk with other people like myself who’ve had their lives changed, often times in more extreme ways than my own. I won’t encroach on anyone’s privacy with any of the crazy and profound details, but people lost jobs, good chunks of time to jail, hurt people. To me it was important to hear them and not compare it to my own situation with it’s own set of struggles. Sometimes hearing about the series of events that came from other people’s choices can give you better insight into your own.

I feel like there’s a lot of us out there that are often paralyzed by the amount of choices we have to make in our daily lives. While sometimes are options are more limited by our circumstance, whether that be through any number of factors from physical to financial, we still have to make a lot of choices each day. Choices we never truly know the outcomes of until they play out.

Now it’s not to say that we don’t have an inherent risk assessment system, that could be your noggin or maybe just a great group of friends who love you enough to threaten to kick your ass if you ever think about doing something so stupid again. We can also decide for ourselves, most times through lengthy trial and error, we can plot what worked for us and didn’t. After a long series of mistakes made with it, I can correctly assess that booze was not great for me and my choices. I can also say that my choice to learn how to do a lot of things in my life has served me VERY well.

I find it funny that I have acquired most of the skills in my life because my ADHD brain has dropped more jobs and hobbies in my lap than most, only to run into the next thing when it felt like it, or in the case of jobs, when they didn’t work out. What can I say, I like to be decent at my job, but I also had a tendency to run until burnout. I’m choosing to be better about that. I can’t effectively do the things I need and want to do without recognizing, while I do have to work to stay ahead, that I also need to take the time to take actual days off. Not just days where I’m not at work, but I’m still working on something. If I chose to continue the model of constantly on the go, I will continue to suffer burnout, exhaustion and a failing at my duties as a human person. If I don’t make the choice to rest, then I can expect to burnout and ultimate fail at something. It’s a good choice for me to rest more. Risk Assessed and it only took me 37 years!

I firmly believe that all of our choices, no matter how well thought out and assessed as being the best choice in the moment, are subject to any number of radical changes, whether our fault or not, that end it not working out. This brings most of us to a healthy fear of our choices, even when we know they have a higher probability of being a “good” choice. We always have to make room for a choice going “bad”, and that is definitely a scary prospect. Of course we can let that become so overwhelming that we avoid making choices at all, or we can take our lumps, cry it out, assess (but not too much), and move on to the next thing.

I finally found out the actual term for what some of us called “Dimple’s Syndrome”, a malady of those of us who grew up in the 90’s and before, where we would go to our local record store (Dimple’s), chore money in hand, only to walk through the door to see racks of tapes and CD’s, and have our brain go, I know longer have any idea what we want. Of course before the days of streaming music etc. you bought an album, often because you liked one song, but found out the rest of the album was a total turd. Option Paralysis is what’s it’s called I just found out not too long ago.

While convenience in digesting content has become easier than it’s ever been before, and that’s great, but it gives rise to the same Option Paralysis coming from another angle. Not the “If I choose this, it may suck” direction, but rather the “Holy shit, where do I even start?!” direction. On one hand you have the fear of a choice that may have a bad outcome, on the other being loaded with so many choices that even though choosing one only has the drawback of wasting a few minutes on it, you still have a rough time choosing.

I know personally, I suffer from “where to start” Option Paralysis the most. There are many things that I could be doing in one area or another to do something fulfilling or productive, but tend to overthink it until it simply doesn’t get done. Whether it’s because I trick myself into thinking it won’t be good or simply forget it because I didn’t write it down. I’m trying to be more cognizant of this and simply start something and keep going. It’s a big part of why I’m trying to write at least 1 thing a day.

What are some of the things you have trouble choosing?

Do you have more trouble with choosing because you fear the outcomes or simply just don’t know where to start?

What are some of the choices you’ve made that ended out well though you didn’t think it would?