#paralysis by analysis

[a-disaster-piece]

So in a nutshell, I have a 3600-page thesis that I am nowhere near to finishing, I am absolutely paralysed by decision-making, and it is destroying my life!

Chidi Anogonye (William Jackson Harper), The Good Place, Season 3 Episode 1, "Everything Is Bonzer!"

(Feeling VERY seen by flipping TV comedy series lately.)

[hello-i-am-a--whatever]

[lilacprimadonna]

[ivarsmas]

More is lost by indecision than wrong decision

by Marcus Tullius Cicero

[yelllowgirl]

my resolutions for 2023:

-join sports/politics clubs - get to know NEW PPL

-find more artistic and philosophical stimulation

-get rejected 100 times, it doesnt matter with what, and get over paralysis by analysis, become more proactive

[manicparadox]

Friend or rival Fenris?

I probably won't get to this for a bit, but I'm planning on doing a run through all three games. I know in DA2 I risk falling into the Anders romance trap (...although my favorite trap...) so I am trying to be strategic and plan on Fenris since I hear so many good things about the romance. So I ask: what do people think? Friend or rival Fenris?

[apartyofone]

Breaking out, one task at a time

It's a really good thing I'm not an ax murderer or other kind of criminal.

Because I can't imagine a worse state than to be sitting in a cell, cut off from the outside world, unable to move forward with my life. Simply existing for an indefinite period of time.

And yet that's where I think I am these days, sentenced to at least another 6 months of inactivity before I'm able to make any significant changes to my life. But I feel like this is a cage of my own making, residing in my own thick skull.

There's soooooo fucking much I don't know about my future and it's almost overwhelming. Just the immenseness of it all -- the sweeping changes about to engulf my life -- is probably the root cause of my inability to focus the past few weeks. What do I focus on first? Where I'm going to live? Will the kids live with me/X? What about moving to Portland? How much are we going to get from our house? And what's going to happen to the duck? 

As I ponder this during my work lunch hour, I realize that I confront this almost everyday - albeit on the other side of the equation. Around here we call it: Paralysis by Analysis. When we give our customers too many options in a message, they end up just backing away and not making any action. "Stick to one CTA (call to action)" I bark almost every week as we review our email campaigns. It's just a matter of deciding which one to focus on. And then devote our creative energies to push the offer.

So for the soon-to-be-divorcing me, it's a question of: what CAN I focus on today. And tomorrow. Maybe there's something else I can look at next week or next month. So tonight I'll start working on a list of all these issues -- from the tangible (possible new neighborhoods) to the intangible (how do I tell my Mother about my impending divorce). Break it up into smaller and smaller bite sizes.

I've always been a person who is motivated by looking forward and reaching for goals. But what can I do today? Plenty. But not too much. Else nothing will be done.

But just enough to break out of my own personal jail.

[formlessandempty]

Commitment Anxiety: Optimal is not fretting about what is optimal.

Any time I ever have opportunities for commitments, I enter into a pro and con state of mind, and in some cases—the ones of importance—this can become crippling, rather than productive. Within me are two highly conflicting tendencies when it comes to commitments: the first is a desire to make an optimal decision (all options considered and this is the best one), the second is to be unwaveringly decisive. These tend to collide in a way such that my unwillingness to make a suboptimal choice demands that I damn well better make the right decision when it comes down to it, which often means exhaustive thought over every possible facet and minutia of the choice in question, which often means working myself up to the point where I get so tunnel-visioned over things that are actually very low on the list of importance, that I work into an anxiety attack (visual distortions give it away), and inflict upon myself a mood of worry that can sometimes make me back out entirely from deciding at all, because the thought of making the wrong choice can sometimes overpower me from wanting to make any choice: textbook paralysis by analysis.

In science and math, right and wrong tend to rule, and where things are not black and white, they are at least probabilistic (generally speaking here). Constant analysis and scrutiny over details within this realm tends to pay off well, and that I think has at times made me apply the same methods towards analyzing "life problems", and while there is a lot of validity to this kind of strict analytical approach, fussing over details ad infinitum pays off far less often in the non-ideal world.

The key thing that I've realized over time—though I admittedly, like today, can fall back into this fruitless pattern of thought—is that analysis is a very good thing to do, but when it comes to decisions, the focus needs to be on making a good one, rather than the best one. While what I'm about to say is intellectually obvious, I've had a hard time actually accepting it to where I actually "take to heart" it's meaning: life is complicated. Ah, yes, the cliché, the trite that tends to be true. And so, slowly, and continually, in conjunction with my constant effort to accept that I am far less intelligent than I think I am, I try to accept that as a human being with highly limited perceptions and understandings, I can't make optimal decisions, because I can't possibly know enough information to make the "best" one. This may seem obvious, but it hasn't been easy for me to accept, which is to say, I still don't accept it at times. What I do know is that once decisions are made, I tend to adapt well; this is something that humans are good at. So, when it comes down to decisions, my truly optimal process is a two-step one:

Analysis, and then a willingness to say "fuck it" and go with my gut.