#81: How to Make a Difficult Decision by Asking the Opinion of Everyone You Know and Then Doing the First Thing You Thought of Anyway
SATIRE
So you’ve got a difficult decision to make, congratulations! Life is full of choices, most of which you’ll fuck up. Luckily there’s no one keeping score. Except God, the girl from your high school who keeps Facebook messaging you to join her MLM, and your Great Aunt Helen. But she’ll be dead soon anyway, gossiping about your bad decision-making with God, finally able to block Megan from the grave so she’ll stop slinging DoTerra Oils on her feed. So don’t mind the score keepers.
The first step in making any difficult decision is to check in with how you’re feeling. Try to identify any emotions that come up in your body. Do you feel a lightness in your chest or the crushing weight of your mortality like an elephant plopped on your sternum? Check in with your jaw. Is it loose like that change in your pocket or tight and clenched like your Great Aunt Helen’s vagina after decades of compulsive kegels? Are those butterflies in your stomach or the gaseous rumblings of an incoming anxious diarrhea? Seriously, maybe you should run to the restroom, that gurgling is audible from over here.
Whatever comes up for you in these bodily sensations is a sign from your gut. Unfortunately, most of us don’t speak gut. Never have, never will. Honestly shouldn’t even try. But if you do manage to translate whatever the digestive hell it’s saying, trust it.
Once you have your gut-given answer, it’s time to question it. Who do you think you are out here trusting a GUT? Your gut no less. Guts don’t even go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt pursuing post-secondary education. Clearly they can’t be trusted. And if you can’t trust your gut, how can you trust you? The good news is, you don’t have to.
You know who probably knows better than you do about what you should do for you? Everyone else. Now is the time to call them one by one.
Seek unlikely wisdom. Start with people who have no idea what they’re talking about. If your big decision is about whether to take a new job in an advanced technical field, call your grandma. Sure, she’s going to gab about it to Great Aunt Helen afterward, but she knows absolutely nothing about [insert niche technical thing here], so her opinion is paramount!
If your decision is relational or interpersonal in any way, call any straight man you know. It really doesn’t matter which straight man, they’re not going to give you good advice. But you know what they will give you? Their opinion. And they’ll probably give it to you in a way that suggests you should completely rethink yours even if it’s exactly the same as theirs. This is what you need. Confuse, gaslight, and overwhelm yourself into indecision. This is how the most important decisions are made.
Once you’ve interrogated at length all your friends, family, loved ones, neighbors, enemies, and sandwich artists about what they would do if they were you, a pattern may emerge. If there’s a right decision to be made, it’s likely started to repeat itself. But beware. Consider whether or not all the people you surveyed are in cahoots to destroy you with an elaborate conspiracy campaign. Sort of like a flash mob for your personal doom. Perhaps the clear right decision is actually the complete wrong one. Great Aunt Helen has been praying on your downfall all along, has she not? If ever you reach consensus when outsourcing major life decisions, run the other way. It’s too good to be true. So you must make it false.
At this point, you should be feeling completely upside-down turned-around topsy-turvy confused. Now that you’ve ruined friendships leaving 18 voicemails rehashing the same 37 pros and cons, been asked to stop attending family dinner for hijacking the conversation to make everyone vote on your issue, and been banned from Subway for refusing to list your toppings until your sandwich artist listed his reasons you should make X decision instead of Y, you are finally ready to decide. Forget everything you’ve been told. Close your eyes. Tap into your gut. And flip a coin.