oh so habituous

How to Create the Future?


Here is an anecdote:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

It comes from a New York Times article called "The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors". Which I recommend you read before continuing.

Here is the abstract from an essay called "Keeping Doors Open: The Effect of Unavailability on Incentives to Keep Options Viable" (link is to a pdf file) from the website (with a name much more tantalizing than the essay title), PredictablyIrrational.com:

Many of the options available to decision makers, such as college majors and romantic partners, can become unavailable if sufficient effort is not invested in them (taking classes, sending flowers). The question asked in this work is whether a threat of disappearance changes the way people value such options. In four experiments using “door games,” we demonstrate that options that threaten to disappear cause decision makers to invest more effort and money in keeping these options open, even when the options themselves seem to be of little interest. This general tendency is shown to be resilient to information about the outcomes, to increased experience, and to the saliency of the cost. The last experiment provides initial evidence that the mechanism underlying the tendency to keep doors open is a type of aversion to loss rather than a desire for flexibility.

The idea behind the anecdote and the experiments? What really motivates us is often the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

Okay, so first go back and read the New York Times article (you can read the essay later, if you want).

Now some thoughts of mine.
I have begun, paradoxically as a result of my understanding myself better, to regret, and to deeply regret, decisions I have made in the past. It hasn't mattered that I have ended up in a place where I am happy and can feel almost tangibly the possibilities still stretching before me: I am still at times overcome with regret for moments of my past, so that I feel like I am falling apart. Isn't that strange? I don't mean it in a figurative sense, but in a real sense -- as if some things unfinished or unchosen have thrown me off some sort of rail and I won't be able to get it straight now no matter what. This is not a constant or particularly persistent feeling, but when I have it it is very strong.

Without making it a matter of morality, these articles and thoughts I found today are reminding me of an understanding I have had at healthier times, when I could admit to myself that this deep regret is on the one hand a valid and important reality, but on the other hand a part of past reality, and it was/is a kind of vanity, maybe, that keeps me from closing those doors, and being able to accept my poor decisions. There are healthy and there are harmful ways of living with/in the past, and I am experienced at least in the harmful ways, which involve ignoring the loss, relishing the feeling of loss, or raging against the loss -- all of which I have done. What are the healthy ways? That is something I can only talk about abstractly and hypothetically. Maybe someone else can comment on how to be gracious with loss. It's hard to talk about when we so rarely need to face it. I guess that's why we're so scared of it, even when playing a little simulated video game.