Freedom From Want

I've been thinking a lot lately about how people make good choices. Not how they collect information, how they evaluate that information, and such… that goes into how people know which choices are good and which are bad, which is a somewhat different question. But how they manage to make the good choices once they have that information in hand.

We've all made bad choices knowing full well what the good choice would be. I've done that more than most. For example, immediately after writing “more than most” I stopped writing and started reading comic strips. Not the best call, I think.

Much of my thinking about this subject has revolved around how to arrange circumstances so that I would be more likely to make good choices. Lifehacking, if you will. Much of it is stuff that everybody knows: avoiding impulse purchasing by waiting a couple days to see if it still feels as important, not going grocery shopping while hungry, any number of tricks to avoid driving while hurried or angry or needing to pee.

People make better decisions when they limit distractions, both internal and external. In some ways this starts to resemble mysticism. Absence of desire, freeing your mind from suffering, trying to avoid letting your frail mortal body affect your mind.

This implies that in many ways making good choices is a result of privilege. Not everybody has the option of avoiding excessive tiredness, or hunger.

This leads inevitably to the topic of free will, determinism, moral responsibility… Yikes. I think this is beyond my pay grade. Some other day, perhaps. It’s late.