What if Most Decisions Aren't Right or Wrong?

What if they're just shades of gray?

Should I have left this place? I don’t know.

Photo by Manson Yim on Unsplash

I think I can claim to have experienced the full arc of life burnout. There was the stage when any email in my inbox filled me with a sense of dread that was so foreboding, I’d sit fixed in place as I tried to breathe through my panic. There was the stage where I felt helpless, surrendered to seemingly intractable situations. Then, I began to work on myself – to take small steps to push myself forward. I forced myself to do hard things that I didn’t want to do. Each time I did, I’d say, “See? You can do hard things. You’ll be okay.” I tell my 10-year-old son the same thing.

I pursued an opportunity that seemed hard. It was. I embraced it. I got better at dealing with stress. The opportunity eventually imploded.

I told myself to confront my fears and took big leaps into unknown places. Cue “…and I would do anything for love…”

I went to therapy. I walked. I listened to life coaching podcasts. I exercised. I meditated. I created routines.

Yet here I am. Somehow, life crept up on me when I wasn’t looking. I let down my guard and in that moment, I reacted to something instead of responding as some version of my best self. And in that moment, the best thing I’d built over the past few years came crashing down.

It just doesn’t seem fair, does it?

You do the work to help yourself. But at some point, you find yourself asking, why do I have to carry everything? How much can one person take? And not long after that moment, your egg is cooked. Your time is up. You cracked. You left open a little gap for doubt and self-pity to slip in. Before you knew it, you were revealing your worst self and everything blew up again.

How do you press on when nothing seems to be working out?

These kinds of things can make you question your major decisions in life. And I don’t think I’m the only one who does so. Many of us go through our adult lives agonizing over whether a major decision is right or wrong. Should I leave a marriage/relationship or stay? Should I quit my job? Should I go back to school? Should I have a child? What should I do? We list out the pros and cons, costs and benefits, of some course of action or another in order to find the one that’s right. We definitely don’t want to take the one that’s wrong.

At the same time, our current post-Covid societal focus on mental wellbeing and health seems to encourage us to treat these kinds of decisions as black or white. Is your job making you miserable? Quit. Better yet, record yourself quitting and upload the call to TikTok so everyone knows you’re being exploited by The System. Invest in yourself – you’re worth it! Is your relationship to your family, parent, friend, or partner difficult? End it. Life’s too short for toxic people.

But what if it isn’t all so black-and-white? Is it never worth it to stay in a difficult relationship with a boss, an industry, a partner, or family? How do you figure out what to do when every option seems to come with an upside and a downside – when none are clearly bad and none are clearly good, but a decision definitely needs to be made?

Perhaps I should clarify that some decisions are unquestionably black and white. For instance, sometimes a situation is obviously abusive. The situations that are inflicting lasting damage to our wellbeing, that prevent us from being able to show up for ourselves and those who depend on us, are not healthy. Situations can also be objectively bad even when we might not think so ourselves. Recently, I watched a Soft White Underbelly YouTube video of a young woman who had been trafficked into sex work around age 13. She knew the work was killing her slowly and she had to get away from it but at age 21, it was so ingrained in her that she didn’t know what else to do. She seemed to agonize over the decision to leave the streets or continue on. Despite her indecision, the nature of the choice was clear: that situation was no good for her, and she needed to leave it behind.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about situations that aren’t so clear – how there can be trade-offs in a work relationship, say, or a personal relationship. These trade-offs can shift over time, too. I got married in my early 20s and the first few years of my marriage were very difficult as I learned to live with someone very much not like me. Over the two-decade span of our relationship, however, it got much easier to live together. In fact, we even lived together for several years after we’d split up simply because it was relatively easy and made logistical sense. Many marriages are like this: there are years that are difficult and years that are easy. So how do we know when to end those relationships or continue on?

Around the time I was deciding to end my marriage, I began to reconsider a decision I’d made before I got married. I’d taken the LSAT, the test for law school, and performed fairly well. I’d gotten just below my ideal score, but it was high enough that a good law school was certainly an option. I ended up not going as I got married instead, and my then-husband’s work was too itinerant to plan to be in any one location for long.

As my marriage ended, I wondered if I’d made the mistake that so many women make, that my mother had cautioned me against. Had I sacrificed my own financial stability for the sake of a man? I could envision how marriage could indeed be an inherently misogynistic institution, as some claim. Studies say women are happier after divorce than men – and that’s despite typically taking a financial hit, which says rather a lot about how marriage works for men and women.

I don’t know if I made a mistake in getting married too young, long before I knew myself well enough to have a sense of whether a partner would be a good match for me in a way that could sustain sharing our daily lives together for years on end. Perhaps I did. It’s true that if I’d become a lawyer, I’d likely be much more financially stable than I currently am. In that version of my life, I’d have stayed in one country and likely in one city. Fifteen years into that career, I’d probably have a lot more to show for it than I do fifteen years into my current career(s). I’d probably have worked a lot. I may or may not have had a child. My success would be evidenced by my house, my car, and other material possessions.

But that’s not the route I took. I got married because I felt alone in life and I wanted someone on my side. I wanted to face life as a team of two, not one. And that meant I struggled to find work that interested me. I fell into education and research. I moved abroad. I lived downtown in a major city just as it was becoming a world-class capital. I saved money, but never got that far ahead. I moved to another major city, an island city where I lived in a tiny village on another outlying island and commuted to work by ferry. I achieved my goals and had a child there, but still never secured much financial stability.

So in the end, what did I have to show for my marriage? The outcomes were not particularly tangible. Yet I had a rich set of experiences that made my life interesting. I was able to do work I valued as much as I wanted to. I never felt lonely because I had a partner and while I’m very capable, I’m not sure that I could’ve done everything I did on my own. The fact is it’s easier to live somewhere foreign, away from family, when you have a partner who shared your life well before you left. It’s easier to move from place to place when there’s someone else to manage the logistics (and it’s not your employer, because you don’t have a swanky expat package). It’s easier to shoulder the stress of finding an affordable place to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world when there’s two of you who can tackle the challenge. It’s easier to have a lifestyle maintained by two incomes than one. It’s certainly easier to have a child with a partner than without, assuming your partner is a reasonable human being.

I think if I’d become a lawyer, my life would have been easier without the stress caused by self-managed moves around the world and starting over at mid-life. I’d probably be less inclined to live in a survival mindset. But I think I also would’ve eventually become depressed. While the material signs of success can make your life more comfortable or convenient, they’re not sufficient to make me happy. I probably would not have learned that I’m happier in general when I walk instead of drive, when I never have to sit in traffic, when I can take trains to my next destination. I’m not sure I would’ve uncovered my love for exploration, whether in terms of scouring the historic district in a new city or eating street food or hiking for views to photograph.

My life would’ve been okay, but different. Less rewarding, I suspect, yet not necessarily bad. Not wrong. So did I make the right choice to not become a lawyer in order to marry someone I would eventually divorce? It seems so, but I say that with the knowledge of hindsight. It’s a lot harder to know what you might have missed from a life you never had.

How do you know when it’s time to move on from a relationship? How do you know when the benefits of your job no longer outweigh the costs? Maybe there’s no right answer and there’s just one version of your life or another. Life one or life two. Maybe its better to not leave that partner who’s still struggling with substance abuse, but making progress. Who knows where they could be a year from now? What if they’re sober? What if staying enables you to build a stronger relationship that proves rewarding in the end?

What if it’s actually okay to stick it out at the job with the terrible boss? Maybe the paycheque stabilizes your life, freeing you from a survival mentality you’re tired of having and giving you the space to explore other ways to be. Who knows where that might lead you?

So maybe it’s okay to stay. To reconsider. To invest. To try again even when we’re uncertain whether this is the right thing to do. Maybe it’s okay to make that trade-off everyone says you shouldn’t do . . . to depend on someone else financially for what that can do for you emotionally. Maybe there’s not always a clear right or wrong.

And maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to cut people out of our lives, to walk away from hardship. After all, we risk cutting out so many people that we end up isolated and alone (“but you can find happiness in being alone!” one might say. Yes, and you can find happiness with others, too). We could end up walking away from so much hardship that we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to grow in ways we didn’t anticipate.

I read an article once about a young woman whose husband had passed away suddenly. Eventually, she remarried. She said if you’d asked her whether she could fall in love with someone else before her husband passed away, she would’ve replied with certainty that no, he was the love of her life. But actually falling in love again showed her that it was possible for us to love more than one person. This meant it was possible for us to have entirely different lives. And if she hadn’t had this entirely different life, she would’ve never known that it was possible . . . because her second marriage was actually better than her first marriage. Her second husband was a better match for her than her first. If she hadn’t had this version of life, she would’ve always felt that her first husband was the best that life could offer.

It strikes me that when we think we’ve made a right or wrong decision, we’re often basing our assessment on what we know. We stayed with someone and it turned out terribly, so it seems like we made the wrong decision. Or we left someone and it turned out great, so we think it was the right decision. But perhaps there’s just different versions of our lives. What if the choice is less about staying or going, and more about choosing to work on the relationship/ourselves or not? What if the twists and turns of our lives are more about our choices around self-adaptation and less about the right path or the wrong path?

Right now, I think I’m better at dealing with disappointment than I used to be. I think my ability to persevere through hardship, which was already pretty damn high, is getting epic. I’ve learned a lot about having a positive mindset and taking responsibility for my emotions. I’m going to get through this next deeply unwanted phase of my life. So I guess I’m adapting to what comes my way. I guess I’m learning that I was never promised life one or life two. There’s just what I have – life three, say – and what I choose to do with it.