Life Choices

Understanding Dilemmas And Decisions

Tod Sloan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429978838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Through readings of 15 life-history interviews, this book creates a framework for the interpretation of dilemmas and decisions. As each individual recounts a specific instance when a life choice was necessary, the supporting analysis reveals the framework that triggered the sense that a turning point had been reached. The author's basic premise is that common sense and mainstream psychology fail to enlighten us about what is actually involved in major life choices. He argues that individuals tend to make decisions that are not in their best interests and that these decisions tend to reinforce the sociocultural structures that were instrumental in the creation of their dilemmas.

1 The Problem of Choice

For many years now, I have been fascinated by the mysterious process that enables us to move beyond confusion and put an end to seemingly endless deliberation by announcing, “I have made a decision!” When we are uncertain about the future and when we hardly know what we want in the present, coming to a decision regarding a course of action represents quite an achievement. At crucial turning points of life—at forks in the road where we know there can be no going back—the accomplishment of a decision is even more impressive.

Yet these same accomplishments, our major life choices, often come to be blamed for subsequent suffering or dissatisfaction. What looked like a wonderfully rational decision may later be viewed as the worst moment of self-deception in one’s life. A spontaneous and self-assured foray into a new realm of endeavor can prove to be the first step on the road to disaster. A heartfelt commitment to a relationship with another person may be interpreted in retrospect as yet another act of unnecessary self-sacrifice.

In these pages we explore the psychology of such life choices. This task is complicated in that any significant choice has an ethical dimension. Choices are not only evaluated in terms of the quality of decisionmaking that went into them but also in terms of right and wrong. This moral quality of choice stems from the fact that the deciding individual is embedded in social, cultural, interpersonal, and historical contexts, all of which may be affected for better or worse by the choice that is made. Simultaneously, the train of thought engaged in by a person trying to make up his or her mind is dominated or influenced by the values, norms, and potential sanctions that characterize those interwoven contexts. Because of this multiple embeddedness, understanding a particular life choice is immensely complicated. Our task will be to face this complexity, including the ethical aspects of decisionmaking, in order to reveal common structures within that complexity.

The questions that prompted me to do the research on which this book is based revolved around the ethical and psychological problem of authenticity, of being true to oneself and to others. One hardly needs to be enamored of existential psychology and philosophical questions about life to be concerned about the problem of authenticity in major life choices. In the deliberation that accompanies most life choices, we often ask ourselves, Should I go along with the crowd or listen to this inner voice? How is it possible to reconcile these conflicting parts of myself? How do I know I’m not fooling myself? What is the right thing for me to do in this situation? How can I balance my most heartfelt needs with my responsibility to others? Each of these questions raises issues of basic personal authenticity.

To find answers to such questions, I decided to examine directly the nature of major life choices. Since there is no way to do this in the laboratory, I went directly to people who could tell me about important life choices they had made or were in the process of making. I conducted multiple, in- depth life history interviews with fifteen volunteer adult subjects. They ranged from twenty to forty years old. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed over a period of several years. I also observed carefully my own decision processes and the choices made by clients working with me in psychotherapy.

The focus of my research—the life choice—soon shaped up to be not a single object but a variety of multifaceted experiences that could be understood only by approaching them from many different angles. Within this diversity, a basic commonality could be discerned, however. In the typical case what I refer to in this book as a “life choice” is set up by a dilemma that emerges in the midst of a relatively stable pattern of personal involvements. The dilemma is disturbing or challenging in that its resolution could require a transformation of one’s commitments, plans, self-concepts, and central activities. Usually the individual proceeds with at least a vague idea of how others faced with similar dilemmas in the past chose to resolve theirs. But this information may not be of much help. Occasionally, it is clear from the outset which particular outcome would be preferable to others and to oneself. If other people lean in the direction of one’s own impulses, deciding may be relatively easy. But even when others seem to know what is best and one agrees with them, it often remains hard to make up one’s mind.

One devotes a certain amount of “thinking” to the issue at hand, perhaps considering the pros and cons of various alternatives. As one unravels fantasies of the consequences of alternatives, one conceives and rejects new possibilities as impractical or unjustifiable—and stores a few for further consideration. One searches haphazardly for cues to the best course of action in a wide range of sources: horoscopes, natural omens, conversations, trivial events, advice columns.

Such deliberation continues intermittently for days, weeks, or months, even though one might later say, “I knew all along what I was going to decide.’’ Then, with no great increment in certainty, it somehow becomes possible or, in many cases, necessary to decide, to make a commitment to a particular course of action. This act of decision may be accompanied by relief, dread, or any number of emotions, depending on the circumstances. Afterward, unanticipated regrets and doubts often emerge. In some cases one will come to think that one actually had no choice at all. In others one becomes certain that another route, the road not taken, would have been highly preferable.

Each of these phases—dilemma, deliberation, decision—somehow gets packed into what is later called a life choice or turning point. Such is the psychological terrain we seek to clarify in this book.

Before plunging into the nitty-gritty of decisionmaking, we would do well to examine the historical context that helped to make life choices an issue for Western psychologists. A useful dimension of life to consider first is our sense of options and constraints. The social and technological revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have vastly increased the options open to individuals. Lifestyles that were previously impractical, or reserved for elites, are now open to millions. The combinations and permutations of life possibilities have rendered “individuality” a quality that many now struggle to cope with, rather than a lofty ideal to be attained. The term “identity crisis” emerged in the mid-twentieth century to label the confusion young adults experience as they confront the explosion of options in affluent mass society. As options multiplied, a cultural emphasis on the construction of a meaningful or successful individual lifestyle began to induce a hyperconsciousness about choices. The existence of options exerts a pressure to decide among them, a pressure few of us seem prepared to handle in a completely satisfying manner. To complicate the matter, just as societal modernity opened up life possibilities, it simultaneously eroded the traditional grounds for knowing what we should do. We thus get stuck between awareness of the need to decide and uncertainty about how to decide.

In times when social structures and cultural values had longer life spans, individuals could ground their engagement in the world on apparently solid foundations. Given that support, one imagines, they could devote attention to the practical matters and dilemmas of everyday life: how to fix the plow, where to find more food, how to get back at the neighbors, or what to do with the ailing grandfather. It would be impossible to enumerate all the factors that changed the scene we know as the “traditional society,” but social scientists point to such factors as the decline of religious faith in the confrontation with science, urbanization, the incredible expansion of communication systems from books to television and electronic mail, the spread of literacy, and the rise of public education. Whatever the causes, the globe is now populated mostly by individuals who have seen (at least on television) hundreds of distinctly different ways of living and who must in turn make choices for themselves about how to live.

In one sense, it must have been hard in the past to know that one could choose only to be, for example, a farmer, a priest, or a merchant, but in a different way it is difficult to select a career when the occupational catalog lists thousands of niches into which one could stuff a life of work. Similarly, it was hard to submit to an arranged marriage or to have to get married shotgun style, but the current scene turns selecting partners for intimacy into a search in a confusing maze; although this may contribute to broader interpersonal experience, it certainly does not spare the individual from emotional pain or loss.

In particular the individuals commonly referred to as “young adults” have a horrendous time with the important life decisions they are expected to make as they move out of the preparation-for-life phase into early adulthood. Consider, for example, this list of “keys to your future fulfillment and happiness” that you should make “thoughtful decisions” about, according to John C. Crystal and Richard B. Bolles’s Where Do I Go from Here with My Life? (1974):

• where you want to live
• kinds of people you want to work with
• activities you will enjoy
• working and living conditions you really like
• ideal job specifications
• values you hold important and beyond compromise
• your major interests
• issues you want to solve, ends to attain
• care of your family and what that requires
• your future lifestyle, and your loved ones’ involvement in it
• financial needs and desires
• educational desires
• alternatives and options to safeguard

The authors tell us that once you know yourself and the realities of the world of work (the major concern of the book), you are “then ready to decide exactly what you most want to accomplish in that world. This requires a series of carefully sequenced decisions ... on the various matters which will be of greatest significance to you for your future” (1974, p. 72).

I have become fairly pessimistic about such claims. Even experienced adults have a hard time with such decisions, and for all their sincerity and resolve, most young adults are actually groping, grasping, stabbing, clinging, or longing their way into an opaque future. All talk of abundant options and possibilities needs to be critically reevaluated in their case. Possibilities have meaning only in light of experience. Young adults are systematically prevented from having many of the experiences that could render their initial decisions less obscure. For example, schoolwork is not particularly conducive to knowing what real jobs are like. Nor do the models provided by parents and siblings constitute an especially good preparation for adult intimacy. As far as the other matters are concerned (such as where to live, job specifications, uncompromisable values), the picture is equally grim. Values cannot be chosen in the abstract; places to live cannot be adequately evaluated in quick tours.

Young adults are not alone in having important life choices to make, although the urgency and difficulty of decisionmaking weigh on them most. Adults in the middle and later years certainly feel compelled to make hard decisions at times and typically wish they could reverse earlier life choices. So despite appearances to the contrary, the pressures and constraints on adult decisionmaking are as intense as they have always been. Limitations due to character, social class, gender, ethnicity, location, health, scarcity, finances, and so on black out the glowing accounts we often hear regarding life chances in a free society.

It is tempting to think of freedom merely in terms of opportunities and constraints. But it is much more than that. When we look at freedom as having something to do with being true to some essential aspects of ourselves or with becoming who we really are or as pertaining to authenticity, the problem of deciding deepens further. Even in a world of plentiful opportunities and minimized constraints, effective engagement is elusive. It is difficult to know what will work and what is worth working toward. Modern deciding becomes strategizing, compromising, a means of situating oneself in and against a complex of social relations—hence, much more than a way of selecting among attractive alternatives.

It is clear that we have nothing to lose and much to gain by asking, How can we better understand our life choices? What do our choices tell us about ourselves? How can we reduce self-deception and augment selfunderstanding? Answering these questions requires an intellectual journey that will lead us to examine life choices from several key perspectives and theoretical points of view. The first perspective sheds light on the ways that choices are embedded in the context of our own individual personalities and life histories. I call this the life-historical perspective. The second perspective focuses on how practical arrangements such as money, relationships, property, projects, and schedules get tangled up in the psychological aspects of decisionmaking. This life-structural perspective is systematically related to the life-historical dimension. The arrangement of one’s life at a given time simultaneously carries forward certain elements of previous experience and reacts against others. Once we have described and illustrated these perspectives, our central task is to examine how the interaction of the two perspectives can be delineated in order to understand the nature of personal dilemmas and decisions. To do so, I draw on the most intriguing insights of cognitive psychology, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. I juxtapose these theoretical orientations with stories from real life for two reasons: to discover the shortcomings of theory in the face of real life and to develop a framework for interpreting one’s own dilemmas and decisions.

2 Life History

Even a casual stroll through a museum of modern art can convince one that twentieth-century representations of the human form reflect the distortions, blockages, contradictions, and absences of modern experience. What artists manage to express in their works the rest of us live out in our daily lives. Modern artists give shape to the hesitation, anxiety, regret, and tension of our inner landscapes. It is on this uncertain terrain, this quicksand of confusion, that questions about life choices are born. These questions about how to live are inextricably linked to questions about who we are, what we stand for, and where we hope to find meaning in our lives.

Life choices are prompted by questions in the first place. In general the questions put to each of us when we face a major turning point are: What are you going to do? Which way will you turn? We could start with a catalog of all the questions people tend to ask themselves at such junctures, but to avoid wasting time on questions detached from real life, we will instead make a preliminary attempt to frame the object of our inquiry. Using the following passage from a series of life history interviews with a woman in her late twenties, we can make our first approach to the slippery phenomenon of decisionmaking:

I came up with a big decision. I don’t know if I told you this before, but when my ex-husband and I split up, I came to the conclusion that I would never date a married man. Our marriage had broken up because of his affair with Suzie, so I wasn’t about to do that to somebody else. But now I’ve been seeing a married man for almost a year [laughs]. That was a very big turnaround in my life. I deliberated about that for a long time. I met this man Carl at the plant. We started talking to each other at work and going out to lunch together. It started as a friendship and things just kind of grew from that. It’s been very beneficial to me, but if things don’t work out in this relationship with Carl, I don’t think I’ll ever put myself through it again. It was a big decision. It took me a long time.

What do we have here? For this subject—let’s call her Sherry—a “big decision” implies a clash of personal values, a major change of attitude, a form of self-contradiction. Note that she places the word “decision” specifically on the moment in which she adopted a new stance toward her self and her world, a stance that implied not only a new course of action but a shift in her subjective attitude toward others.

What is hiding beneath this word that fits so neatly on that complex moment? I asked her, “What went through your mind as you tried to make that decision?”:

I recalled a lot of things that happened to me when my ex started going out on me, when our whole marriage started breaking apart. As I thought about these things, I stopped my whole program, both physically and mentally. I just closed down and avoided people just to think about it. I had to come to some kind of conclusion that would be fair, to what I thought was right and what Carl’s wife would feel was right and what Carl would feel was right. It was a big turmoil for a really long time.

Most of us associate the word “decision” with this sort of intense thinking. The thinking is absorbing and time-consuming. We stop in our tracks. Our routine is interrupted. We seek a conclusion that will allow us to move forward with a compromise in mind. Sherry would not let herself merely act. She paused in order to find justification for a problematic action.

What is most puzzling about this ret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword, George C. Rosenwald
• 1 The Problem of Choice
• 2 Life History
• 3 Life Structure
• 4 Psychologies of Decisionmaking
• 5 Life Spheres
• 6 Transitions
• 7 Life Projects
• 8 Authenticity
• 9 Ideology
• 10 Back to the Future
• Suggested Readings
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index