This has to be at the more abstract end of “things to ask the internet”. If you wanted a standard, hippy-humanist answer such as: “It’s right if it feels right, and wrong if it feels wrong”, you’d probably just ask a reasonably kind and thoughtful person. The fact that this question is addressed to a giant information network that knows absolutely nothing about you or your circumstances surely means it’s serious. That it’s also asked post factum suggests a mischievous approach to time and reality. Perhaps you’re hoping to be reminded that string theory argues for the idea of a multiverse in which parallel realities can co-exist.
While you may fear that you married the wrong person, bought the wrong car, or shouldn’t have committed a crime, don’t worry because some physicists may argue that there are infinite versions of you out there in polyamorous, ambisexual relationships, driving very cheap or expensive vehicles while sometimes obeying the law. Meanwhile you can screw up as much as you like in the happy knowledge that one of you is bound to be getting everything right.
Or maybe you’re not too concerned about what goes on in radically inaccessible alternate worlds. Perhaps you are more perturbed by the idea that you only live once. While for some people yolo means bungee-jumping off bridges, for others it means eating 10 portions of fruit and veg a day and sticking assiduously to a constantly updated five-year plan. Life itself can come to seem like a never-to-be-refilled savings account, every penny of which must be spent wisely. Making a “wrong” decision feels like flushing money down the toilet.
But how can you possibly know when a decision is faulty? Maybe you regret it at the time, but then learn from your regret and end up doing something you’d never otherwise have imagined. Perhaps the fact that you missed out on one thing left you available for another. Maybe a decision you made put you at a disadvantage but helped someone else – possibly without your knowledge. Would you mind if that was the case? All decisions have knock-on effects, which have knock-on effects, and so on. Even without the pesky complication of the Many Worlds Interpretation there’s a problem here with temporality and sequentiality. When do you decree that something was definitively a bad move? It would take a major intervention along the lines of Armageddon and Judgment Day to finally settle the question. And that’s perhaps one of the reasons why the Bible’s still in print.
Still, wouldn’t it be sad and boring to give up on the idea of right and wrong decisions altogether – a bit like an endless game of Candy Crush with the sound switched off? As Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man shows us, every minor life decision is a gamble, and gambling is fun. It may be that some rare people are able to reach nirvana and not mind at all what happens to them. There are also plenty of people who feel utterly hopeless and disengaged from the world. If you are asking the internet whether you made the right choice, you’re probably in neither of these categories. The question hints at an investment in life’s wins and losses. It also alludes to the possibility that you may, in fact, have opted for the “right” thing. Perhaps you are hovering between the two alternatives, extracting delicious suffering from the notion that certain aspects of life could be different.
Fretting about decisions after the event is a brilliant way of manufacturing bittersweet emotions. You can hit yourself with a delicious pang of regret and follow it up with a self-congratulatory backslap. This way you definitely know you’re alive. The fact that you left school at 16 or failed to kiss Jenny Smith opens up the option of an unlimited fantasy space in which either or both of those decisions are reversed and everything looks cool and shiny – a temporary relief from the world as it actually appears to you. And this alternate reality doesn’t even rely on complex, speculative mathematical theories – it’s just there for whenever you’re in the mood. After which you can snap back and even be glad about the way things panned out.
Human beings are great at eking out enjoyment from imagined satisfactions. Making decisions is lovely because whatever gets closed down in reality opens up in fantasy. As long as you’re good at oscillating between the two, without getting lost in self-reproach or elevating dreams to a status where daily life seems trashy by comparison, you can continue to experience the best of both worlds. The worst option has to be to fail to make the decision in the first place, relegating all options to daydreams while your wheels spin in the mud.
So yay for making the decision at all. In some sense you’ve already won.
