I’m going to be unoriginal today and turn you on to one of The New York Times’ most emailed articles of the day. The article discusses research at M.I.T. into our reluctance to let any of our options go. We are simply unwilling to close any doors to ourselves, even though leaving options open isn’t always to our benefit.
It is an interesting concept and one I need to chew on a while, since one of my mantras, when it comes to making decisions, is that except for suicide, murder and having a baby, there are no choices we can make that can’t be un-made, one way or another. I find that comforting. However looked at it through the lens of this research, I realize it might also be self-defeating in some way. By leaving too many options open, are we entering each new endeavor with less than the commitment necessary to succeed?
I remember when Tom and I finally decided to get married after living together for five years, a friend who had also lived with her husband before marrying told me she found marriage a relief because it signaled, “the end of ambivalence.”
Yes, there was relief to making our default setting “together.” In a way, the commitment was freeing. In a way, before you firmly close doors, you force yourself to make the same decisions daily. How exhausting.
Perhaps this is a new way to visualize the tired concept of “closure.” The moment we close a door and stop giving ourselves the option to waffle and reconsider (be it a concrete decision or in a response to pain) we allow ourselves to move freely forward.
The article is pegged to a book called Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
.And here's a link to the original research (in PDF form).
2 comments:
I got into a lengthy discussion with a friend the other day on how long you should date someone before changing your relationship status on MySpace or Facebook. It's a big deal.
Ooh, excellent point. After all, the other person might not define it as a "relationship" yet. They need a "dating" option.
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