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comment by YetAnotherAccount
YetAnotherAccount  ·  3548 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: what's your baggage?

Mine? Anxiety, I guess? Or rather...

I have... issues... making decisions. Or rather, I have issues classifying the importance of decisions. Choosing where to go to University for me was easier than figuring out what to do for supper.

If I know something is important, a) people don't tend to rush me on it and b) it tends to be something where there are clear differences between the options, and a clear way of judging what option is best. But when it's something that is probably not important, but needs to be decided in a timely manner... Issues ensue. Of the looking shellshocked variety.

So, with something like choosing where to go to University? I can sit down and go over all the options, compare, and eliminate options until I get to the choice that was the best for me at the time. And even if it doesn't work out it's not the end of the world, as my decision was justified at the time - worse comes to worse I know what I missed last time.

But with something like "What shall we have for supper"... I get paralyzed. Too many options, and no clear value function - no clear way to judge what is better, no clear way to justify my choice. And something that probably isn't important, but there's that nagging "what if". What if there was something in the fridge that needed to be used up. What if I add something to supper that makes it awful. What if I mess up cooking something and someone gets sick. Etc.

Although, amusingly enough, I have no issues with baking. Probably because with baking you're expected to (mostly) follow a recipe, and you're expected to have everything in the house. Same reason why I don't have much of an issue with following a recipe that someone has picked out.

(I'm focusing on cooking here, but it's not just cooking. That's just the first example that comes to mind.)