We all hesitate making decisions that will alter our lives and those around us. We prepare for snowstorms, hurricanes, fires because we are certain of the imminent consequences.
Yet, many of us are letting life decisions slip by or even fade away because we are so uncertain of the unknown consequences.
Even though we dream about and imagine our future, many procrastinate dealing with the true life-altering decisions. We allow the complexity of change to rule our thoughts where we focus on the things that could wrong instead of what could go right making us feel trapped in circumstances beyond our control. While some have more natural proclivity to a pessimistic outlook than others, this has become the present state of mind.
According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans believed, whether perceived or real, that they were worse off today than they were four years ago, the highest it has ever been since this question was first polled in 1984.
How did we get to this level of personal dissatisfaction where long-term decision-making seems inconsequential?
Why bother when
- the market is going to crash
- jobs have become nontraditional
- education is overpriced and questionable
- friends are less expensive than getting married
- housing is unsustainable and unattainable
- there is no one to take care of my kids
- food and keeping up with the IG Jones’ are overwhelming
- I have to work until I’m dead
- the world is ending?
Negative sentiment perpetuates pessimism. It becomes even more pervasive with the constant, ruthless information that is algorithmically generated into our silos and echo chambers heightening this dismal atmosphere. Technology inflation has changed how we view and navigate life. It has impacted our priorities and how we spend money. It has inflated our perceptions, our frame of references and our expectations. It can derail us from making the decisions that could in the long run make us better-off and more satisfied.
My husband and I often watch the nightly national news while cooking dinner. We joke making it into a drinking game for every negative, terrifying, catastrophic, breaking news event that is reported, but we’d be drunk before we even eat. 5 minutes of heart-warming stories at the end doesn’t offset 20 minutes of edge-of-your-seat doom and gloom.
If your decisions are always short-term, what happens when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or disaster happens, and you are forced to make a consequential decision in a short amount of time with limited information? You aren’t experienced dealing with the intangible, unknown future. Every life-altering decision will have an impact to your long-term finances along with unknown consequences.
When we moved to New Mexico in 2006 for new opportunities, the sales contract on our house in Virginia fell through after we were already under contract to buy a house in Albuquerque. And I was officially laid off from my Virginia job I was working remotely (the first time I had the inkling my position was being downgraded.) On the surface, our decision to move looked like a mistake because everything that could go wrong did. But we survived and were far more prepared for the life-altering decision to move to California during a housing crisis.
Current research is exploring how decisions, specifically financial, made on smartphones (vs. laptops, desktops or tablets) are more likely to be shortsighted, resulting in being unwilling to save for retirement, referring only to recent information while making financial decisions, and opting for instant but smaller rewards. We can sell stocks, borrow money from a friend and cash out our 401(k)’s on our smartphones that could encourage decisions that are not so smart and neglect the long-term consequences of our behavior. (Benartzi, 2016)
The qualities of smartphones imply why smartphone use could at times be comparable to streamlined experiences, quick solutions, instant gratification and feel-good indulgence, which are often the opposite of well-thought-through decision-making that requires preparation, deliberation and long-term planning.
Then how do you make life-altering decisions in a time when pessimism rules the day?
Preparedness
Ask yourself the hard questions. Some of them you may not be able to answer but it will make you aware of what other factors could change or pose a challenge. Pray, meditate, ponder. Then write (type) it out. This becomes the basis for your plan.
- What are my options?
- What are the pros and cons of each outcome of the decision?
- What am I giving up and what am I gaining?
- How will the decision affect those around me?
- Could it give me more flexibility?
- How will it change my identity?
- What resources do I need?
Critical Thinking
Define what is within your control that will improve your life and the lives around you. Your capacity to reason with what will be challenging will help you find solutions. Stop the comparison to others, the negative filtering and confirmation bias because it will open your mind to consider new ideas and different perspectives.
Be aware of when you are influenced more by past investments (sunk costs) than by potential future benefits (opportunity costs) of what could be.
But also listen to your gut, intuition, voice in your head whatever you want to call it. It can be telling.
See the Big Picture
Literally. In more ways than one. If you are making decisions based on your smartphone or even tablet, get a laptop, desktop or something that you can connect to a large screen or monitor with a keyboard and mouse/touchpad. I replaced my Mac this week just shy of 12 years old. Take the cost of a laptop/desktop, divide it by 10 years for Mac, 5 years for Windows (I use both), then divide it again by 12 months. It’s roughly the cost of a monthly subscription that you never use.
Seeing your future in the years to come is hard, seeing it decades from now is challenging but that is where the true insight and understanding happens. It can take decades for you to realize how life-altering a decision actually was.
You can see housing pictures, neighborhoods, communities, amenities in greater relationship to one another on a larger screen, of what could be.
You can’t see year after year and decades of loan paying, mortgage reducing, income increasing, interest returns compounding, net worth building, health improving and your treasures flourishing on a smartphone screen.
Collaboration
Colleagues, friends, SO, spouse, family – the real people in your life, not the ones in your daily feed, are those who will influence your life-altering decisions. In The Attention Economy, I wrote –
Life is a series of choices and trade-offs. None of them being equal. Where and who you give your attention will determine your trajectory in life. If you continually choose to give your attention away to short-sighted things, distractions and the short-term tactical, you will never get to the level of focus required to identify your long-term, overall aims, interests, values and the means to achieve and keep them – being strategic. You have to understand and get comfortable dealing with intangible, unknown, hard-to-grasp concepts that some just can’t do and most can’t do alone.
Most of us need someone to bounce our ideas off of and test the solidity of our thinking, future goals and plans whether we may be missing something or have overlooked a possibility. If we engage people who can only point out what will go wrong, think you are delusional or abandoning them and can’t see beyond tomorrow, that pessimism spreads. Find people to collaborate with who think about what could go right, give you the realistic possibilities and have an unrelenting optimism for tomorrow even if today isn’t promising.
The more you work through the process of making these important, strategic decisions, the better you become at it. The execution of your decision will never go perfectly as planned. There will always be something you missed or a facet that you have no control over that you have to deal with and resolve.
If you continually wait for life to improve before making or executing on any consequential decision, the pessimistic, smartphone-induced groupthink will eventually give way to you making short-sighted choices. By facing the uncomfortable, sometimes overwhelming effort of making long-term life-altering decisions and the ensuing change and unpredictability, you set yourself on a path of opportunity rather than a life of inaction where no decision becomes what you choose. This is the absolute meaning of missing out with true regrets.
You can choose to wait, or you can choose to take action thinking less of what can go wrong and seeing more of “What Could Go Right” – Thomas Rhett.
The tangible improvements we have experienced in the financial economy this past year, not to mention the other improvements of the last three decades haven’t made a dent in overcoming the reigning pessimism. Beginning mid-2020, this negative sentiment exponentially grew and compounded as Americans became more dissatisfied with the type of life that emerged post-pandemic. The pervasiveness of this is evident in the comments on this YouTube video where job transformation, childcare, food, insurance, education, unattainable investing-stock market, unreported/unprosecuted crime, billion-dollar wars are a factor, but housing costs eclipse them all – an article for another week.