Stories & Decisions.

When you deeply care about what is being said, you can ponder a story you have heard and make it your own. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen very much of the time.

In order to comprehend, learn from, and remember what you hear, you have to already think something about what you are being told, you have to care about it, and it has to cause you to revisit what you thought you knew, and modify your thought.

This tells us something about how we make decisions. In the popular imagination, people ponder all the variables, weigh the factors, analyze the numbers, and come to a conclusion. The reality is HELLA different.

In fact what we do, when faced with the need to make a decision is we try to think of what story we already know that matches the situation we are in. We recall the decisions made in that story and how they turned out, and then we decide on that basis. In other words, we tell ourselves a story and see if we already know that one and how it ended.

WE TRY TO REFRAME BIG DECISIONS AS SMALL ONES, IN ORDER TO FOOL OURSELVES AND OTHERS INTO BELIEVING WHAT SEEMS BIG IS REALLY SMALL.

I think there is something very important here. I have always been fascinated by the fact that (in spite of what they teach us in school) logic, reason, rationality and sensible analysis seem to play so little part in the way we make decisions: at school, when we are with our homies, and elsewhere.

It sometimes seems as if, for all of us, nearly all the time, past events triumphs over reason, personality over substance, impulse over logic, gut instinct over the facts.

-Alan