How Your Brain Tricks You Into Avoiding Decisions

0:00I think a lot of people today are just adrift. So this feeling of being adrift, having too many options... This is very indicative of what Kierkegaard considered the aesthetic stage of life. And he actually had three stages that he identified that people have to go through to find their commitments, to find their life's path. Now, that first stage is the aesthetic stage. The second stage is called the ethical stage. And then the third stage is the religious stage.

0:27And we're going to construct the entire podcast around Kierkegaard's three stages. And we're going to go really deep on what each stage requires. Okay. how you fall into it, how you get out of it, how you transition to the next stage, so that you can end up in a place where you feel like you have some powerful, meaningful life commitments. Yeah. And let me just say the religious stage doesn't necessarily mean you have to be religious. Yes. Yeah. Kierkegaard used the word religious, not literally.

0:55It is metaphorically. There was this guy, the Walter Kaufman in the 70s, who kind of followed up with Kierkegaard. He was like, OK, Kierkegaard, he's got this cool framework around all of this and not making commitments and making commitments and all this. He wrote this whole book on like how we go about doing that. So like common ways we go about doing that. The one section that I found was really interesting were these 10 ways he came up with that we avoid commitments in our life.

1:19He called this tendency like decidophobia. Okay. He coined this term. It's another type of dread or it's the same type of dread, I think, that Kierkegaard was talking about. And it's the dread that comes with making decisions that shape your own life when your eyes are wide open. So holding that tension. Right. We don't like that tension, like we've already said. So he came up with these 10 ways. I don't think I'll go through all of them here, but there's a few that I've just found really interesting that I want to highlight.

1:46One of those being drifting. What do you call drifting? There's kind of two versions of this, okay? One is where you go through life. You go along with just the existing order. What society tells you, what your parents tell you, what the school tells you. Go with the flow. That's drifting. You don't have to make a decision there. You don't have to make a commitment. Somebody else has made it for you. You don't have to sit with that tension. And that's how you avoid it anyway.

2:05Yeah. The other is you just reject all structure. So we've kind of already, there's people who, like we said, we already know these people who just reject everything. And they're like, no, I'm not going to live anything like this. And so again, you don't have to make the decision. You don't have to make the commitment to anything there either. The interesting thing about that though, and Kaufman notes this, is that that often turns into a hunger for commitment after, like you said, most people will see like, oh God, this isn't working anymore.

2:32And so they'll swing really hard the other way and go for a commitment rather than just drifting along. Another one he points out is marriage. Now, there's a caveat here. He calls this kind of like the big one or the primary one that people will get into a marriage just to like not feel alone anymore or to just resolve that area of their life. I know a lot of people like this. I've had several friends who've gotten divorced and they're like, I got married because I thought that was the thing you just do.

2:57Right. And they're like, I just wanted that part of my life taken care of. Obviously, that's a bad reason to get married. Kaufman isn't saying everyone does that. He's saying there's actually, you know, marriage can be a very life-enlarging thing for you, too. As long as you do it with your eyes wide open, right? As long as you know why you're getting into it. The other one I wanted to point out, too, he says the way we avoid... really hard decisions, religion, okay?

3:19I'm not gonna shit on religion here because there's a caveat to this one as well. But he says that religion, it really, it reduces decisions you have to make by just supplying all the rules for you, right? Here's the book, here's the commandments, here's the 10 things you can and can't eat or whatever it is. The problem he has with it is that most believers have never really questioned it to begin with, right? They were just born into a system and they just accepted that.

3:44He was totally a fan of like, if you're in a religion because you've chosen it and you've doubted things, you've went through all the stages of really exploring it and identifying with it eventually and accepting that and holding that tension, like this could be... Complete bullshit. I don't know, but I'm going to choose to believe it anyway. Again, he's not shitting on marriage or religion or anything like that. His main point throughout this whole thing was you're making these decisions with your eyes wide open and holding that tension.

4:12One of mine is like, I'll stack the deck. Like I'll come into something and be like, well, I'm going to... get into a relationship that I'm not super invested in anyway, you know, just because it'll end and it's fine and I'll be okay with it. That's not really a decision at the end. That's not a commitment at the end of the day, right? Like that's one I use anyway, sometimes, or, you know, it used to be that way with jobs with me too. It's like, ah, this is fine job.

4:37I'll take it for now. It doesn't matter if I lose it or not. It's hard because I think... Not every decision deserves like a full-throated commitment. That's a good point. And I think if we approached every decision as a full-throated commitment, we would exhaust ourselves and we would actually drive ourselves a little bit crazy. These are like heuristics, right? Of like you're outsourcing a certain percentage of decisions with kind of the understanding of like, okay, maybe it's not going to be perfect, but- I'm not going to have time to think about all this stuff or deal with all this stuff.

5:13So it seems to work for other people. I might as well do it too. I do think some of that is inevitable. I think... ultimately, and we'll get to this later on, ultimately, we all need at least a handful of things in our lives that we do feel fully committed to with our eyes open, as Kaufman would put it, as though we have opted into it. I do think it's that perception of agency and choice that matters so much. We all have commitments that we don't really feel like we chose, and so we don't identify with them that much.

5:48But... When you do feel like you chose a commitment, then it becomes part of who you are. You develop a pride, a sense of self around it. And then it really starts to matter. And it adds a lot of meaning. There's one point, too, that Kaufman makes in this book. Sometimes it doesn't always look like decidophobia either, right? You can take the marriages. Oh, yeah, you're getting married because you love this person. That's what it looks like. Okay.

6:09One decision in my life that I made, though, I don't think I've ever told you about this. I was actually accepted into an occupational therapy program. Really? So this was my whole, I don't even know where to start, honestly. Buckle up, everybody. No, no, no. Drew's life story. Here we go. It won't be that bad. No. I took a fifth year in college. I had a super senior year. That's what we called it back then. Yeah. Yeah, ostensibly because there was one class I needed to take and it wasn't offered until the next semester.

6:38So I was like, I'll just take the whole year. And like, yeah, but and I loved college, too. So I was just doing that. But I went through that. And then I still didn't know what I wanted to do at the end of that, that five years of education and exploring. So I was like, oh, I had a friend whose dad was an occupational therapist, and I really liked him and he let me shadow him and stuff like that. So I got accepted to this occupational therapy program.

6:58Was fully planning on going. And then the lab that I was working in as an undergrad, they offered me a full-time position, but it was only a one-year contract because they only had funding for one year. And I was like, oh, great, I can do that instead. And it's only a year and then I can go decide again. So I kept putting it off like that. It seemed rational and reasonable at the time from the outside that it was a fine decision, but... Honestly, what I would, it was just decidophobia is what it was, you know?

7:22So it doesn't always have to look like, like, oh, I'm just avoiding this decision. In that case, it really didn't look like I was, I had all these reasons for it. It's like, oh no, I actually, I want to go into this field instead. And there's this position that opened up and how lucky am I? And I've been working with these people and I know them and I know it's, you know, stable and all of this. So. I feel like the side of phobia is kind of like a more practical way of describing what Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith, living in bad faith.

7:48Like, so in Sartre's framework, you know, we are all making choices in every moment of every day of what we pay attention to, what we pursue, what we care about. And that responsibility that comes with all those choices is incredibly burdensome because it's like, who knows if you're choosing the right thing. And it basically implies that every problem in your life is your responsibility. So people find ways to avoid that and start called it living in bad faith.

8:15But he basically was like outsourcing your responsibility to other people or other things. Yeah. And I feel like Kaufman's decidophobia framework is kind of like a bullet list of all those ways that we tend to do that. We look for situations like that of like kicking the can down the road or just following along what our friends are doing. It's easier than having to think about it for yourself or just getting married because that's what you're supposed to do or just, you know, believing the things that.

8:41The church you grew up in believes it because that's just easier to do. Hey, everybody. Hope you enjoyed this video. It was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode. If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description. And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com slash commitment. See you in the next one.