Understanding Hard Choices

Introduction

• Hard choices are often perceived as agonizing and significant.
• Misunderstanding of hard choices and their role in our lives.
• Hard choices uncover hidden power within us.

What Makes Choices Hard

• Easy choices: one alternative is better than the other.
• Hard choices: each alternative has different advantages with no clear better option.
• Examples: moving to the country vs. staying in the city for work, choosing between healthful cereal and tasty donut.

Misconceptions about Hard Choices

• Hard choices are not necessarily big or because we lack intelligence.
• Realizing that small choices can be hard too.
• Personal anecdote: choosing between careers in philosophy and law.

The Fear of the Unknown

• Common motivational default when dealing with hard choices.
• Mistake to assume one option is better, taking the least risky option by default.

The Fourth Option: "On a Par"

• Alternatives often aren't better, worse, or equal but are "on a par."
• "On a par" means alternatives are in the same league of value but differ in kind.
• Hard choices don't mean equally good; coin flipping isn't the solution.

Comparison of Jobs: Investment Banker vs. Graphic Artist

• Example of improving one alternative (e.g., higher salary) doesn't always make it better.
• Original jobs were not equally good even if improvement doesn't make one better than the other.

Values vs. Scientific Quantities

• Values (justice, beauty, kindness) aren't like scientific quantities (length, mass).
• A new, fourth relation in choice theory: being "on a par."

The Power to Create Reasons

• In hard choices, individuals can create reasons for themselves.
• A world of only easy choices would enslave us to pre-existing reasons.
• Exercising normative power: making yourself a certain kind of person based on choice.

Becoming Authors of Our Own Lives

• Instead of seeking external reasons, look internally: "Who am I to be?"
• Hard choices give us the opportunity to define ourselves.
• Drifters vs. those who put their agency behind their choices.

Conclusion

• Hard choices offer precious opportunities to define our individuality.
• They are not sources of agony but opportunities to celebrate the human condition.
• Hard choices are a godsend, not a curse.