I’ve removed choice from my days for many things – feeding my cat and rabbit, thinking about art, eating.
But there are many choices that remain – when to feed them, whether to also look at or learn about art, and hugely what to eat.
decision fatigue
…even thinking whether to keep writing about it makes me need a nap.
If the average person makes 34000 decisions a day, i feel like i must make at least 80000. Beware: work complaint incoming.
My job as a project manager means that from 8 am to 4pm at least I am not just making decisions for myself and what to do, but for 13 other people as well.
In the last note i stuck up here on this digital billboard of mine, i was a bit peeved with Robert Frost’s The Road not Taken. Well, I am nothing if not moderate. Here is the balance: I love Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.
The tired voice looking down the cold empty road before him hits me every time right to my marrow.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I long to veer into the lovely, dark, deep woods and sleep in the snow so that I do not wake up but feel the delirious warmth of hypothermia creep through my human jelly brain. Then remember the people I love, and how I would never do that to them. Choose life. So I breathe, make the next choice, for whoever it is needs a choice made, and then the next, even the little bones in my ears vibrating with the effort.
The poem echoes other favorites of mine – the poem that made me want to be a poet.
The Hollow Men, by T. S. Eliot
The last lines are so similar in intent, imagery, and repetition:
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Again, you can feel the breathless hopelessness running right through you. Eliot is speaking on a much more external scale, macro scale. This dear dear emotion shows me that my decisions don’t even really matter that much on a macro scale, and this allows me to not care if I keep making them of not. The snowy blanket weighing me back from reaching my goals, I can keep choosing.
which brings me to my last lodestone for despair: Kafka.
I know, I know. He’s not traditionally an uplifting reading, but, I encourage you to rethink it — him.
Kafka had everything miserable thing plus the sink thrown at him. But he kept writing. Even if it wasn’t published. Even if he didn’t take it seriously. Even if he knew it wouldn’t bring around the loving relationships and freedom he so, and I so, and you so, and we all so crave, was not forthcoming.
The Metamorphosis is full of nuggets on choice. And he keeps making positive choices for himself and those around him.
“I only fear danger where I want to fear it.”
“Calm —indeed the calmest— reflection might be better than the most confused decisions”
“But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.”
Constantly, throughout, you can feel Kafka’s own decision fatigue:
- → sometimes he triumphs and his characters conquer their fear.
- → sometimes he expresses defeat and his characters give up on one another
But always they are facing the same choices we all do –
- → Go to work or take a sick day?
- → Support your sister or ignore her plight?
- → Keep moving like a mad hummingbird or sit still and think about it a minute?
This blog helps me with the last for sure.
I have decided to remove some options from myself, just to help a little bit, so that hopefully even i wake up as a cockroach one morning, there will be fewer things dragging me to the peace of mythically deathful forest full of snow and wil o whisps.
Painting of Kafka by Louis Bau
Erin Oubliette 
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