In either direction, you look there is a sharp turn obscuring your view. The only thing which distinguishes the two options is your sense of direction. You know you would like to navigate the maze to the prize which is hopefully at the end but you’ve never seen it or known why it’s worth having. Paths are hard to choose and direction sometimes misleading. It occasionally happens that we feel like we know where we want to go only to find that along the way we have been turned around. This confusion is life. How do we pick a route when we don’t know what makes us happy? How can we know a course of action results in the best life? Why can’t we just believe that everything will be okay? We will endeavor to explore possible answers to these questions in an attempt to make the world a less confusing place.
It seems any decision we make is final. As if one were to decide to go to a technical school or earn a bachelor’s dictated the course of one’s life in its entirety and sets our amount of happiness in stone. I will argue that it does not. That despite how it feels, in our own lives we are free to make mistakes and change. This is because it is not incumbent on any person to have one objective, one purpose, in life. At the outset of a career or at the end of one, it is ever only the self and one’s relations that matters.
Throughout high school and college, the ever impending question ways on the consciousness, what will I do with my life? We are pressured to give an answer, pestered for a quick solution that will satisfy. Whether it is family, friends or even ourselves, there is always some tinge of judgment in the question. Perhaps we decide to be doctors, or IT managers, or teachers, or restaurateurs but what then? It seems after that, one is committed to work ceaselessly towards a singular goal in order to achieve success. This does not account of a reality of life however, that not everything works.
Should we judge people if they have to make a decision based on incomplete information? Take, for example, a situation where there is a doctor walking down a hallway in an apartment building. Within this same building, someone is having a heart attack. The doctor is made aware of the fact that someone within the building has heart complications but knows nothing else. Should we then blame the doctor for not saving the person afflicted with a heart attack? I believe the answer which would come quite clear to most people is a resounding no. We cannot expect the doctor to save this person, even though she could because she is unaware of the problem. Extrapolating from this instance, there is no reason we should be judging ourselves for initially choosing the wrong paths. It is not possible to know what exactly we will look like on the other side of substantial life events, nor is it feasible to know all of one’s propensities. We can only come to know all of these things by experience, so it would be best for us, instead of stressing over a life-changing decision, to take a step back. When we do such step taking, our next step should be to analyze the situation as rationally as we can. Then attempt to decide which route is most likely to bring the greatest degree of happiness, satisfaction, and stability from what we now know. After this, we can then explore that decision we have made through experiencing it, knowing that we chose it based on our best information at the time. Perhaps then we find that it works out well; say in the choice of a career. Then we have successfully picked the right option and that is a wonderful thing. But perhaps we find that we are unsatisfied or unhappy or unsuited to the decision we have made, should we then blame ourselves? If it holds that we can’t blame people for acts they have done based on limited information, then we have done no wrong here. It is not because we are bad people that our decision did not turn out to be optimal, it just happens to be the way the world is. What we can do from here, however, is make a new decision.
Our goal then cannot be to come to the absolute best and final conclusion when deciding which way to go in important moments, but rather trying what we think will succeed. If and when we find that we have made the wrong choice in a particular circumstance, the issue is not then with us as people but with what to do next. Sure it’s possible that we will not have the same choices we once did, but we can only work with what the present possesses. We should not feel too bad about opportunities lost because we have acted to the best of our capacity. What is important is that we make decisions despite stress, do not eviscerate ourselves for our failures, and explore what life has to offer.