Soulful Sundays: Decision

decide: (Latin: decidere, “to cut away”)

On June 1, 1945, President Truman faced one of the toughest decisions that a human being would ever face. After more than four protracted years of conflict in World War II, Truman was confronted with the unfathomable choice of whether or not to deploy the atomic bomb. The evidence weighed heavily in favor of its use. The Japanese had declared their willingness to fight to the bitter end, and an invasion of Japan would most likely spell the loss of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of American lives. Yet the use of atomic weaponry would not only destroy tens of thousands of Japanese lives, it would also set the precedent for the next epoch of warfare. The decision of one man has rarely held such weight.

We all make decisions in our lives. Every day involves perhaps hundreds of such inflection points, both big and small, that most of us successfully navigate. Sometimes, though, we are filled with regret. The good news is that poor decision-making may not be entirely our fault. Human decision-making power is a finite resource that gradually becomes depleted as the day unfolds. This is why most of us tend to have sharper judgment in the morning, with the quality waning under the weight of accumulated choices and stress. The formation of habits and heuristics are two ways of slowing this fatigue, but both come with their own risks.

Aristotle keenly saw the necessity of freeing up one’s cognition and wrote about the importance of habits in his Rhetoric. Habits create predictable routines that require very little decision power to execute. Likewise, heuristics represent pre-formed guidelines for shaping choices. Unfortunately, humans are notorious for choosing poor habits, and we can fall into dangerous prejudices by holding onto “useful” heuristics long after their utility has passed.

Human psychology is a tricky beast. Our reasoning, more often than not, comes after the fact. We like to think we are logical creatures weighing out pros and cons, but in truth, much of our decision-making begins in the body and the emotions. We feel first, then we explain later. As psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt once put it, “we act on gut feelings and make up reasons post hoc.” The wisdom here is humbling. We are not purely rational agents cutting through life with clean logic, but rather gardeners of the self—pruning, shaping, and tending to what grows within us.

Neuroscience sharpens this picture even further. Memory itself is not a fixed record of the past but a living, fluid force that shapes the present. Each recollection is less like retrieving a file from storage and more like rewriting a story. The brain tends to reinforce memories that align with positive outcomes and blur or diminish those linked to discomfort. In this way, memory becomes an artifact of the decision tree—guiding us subtly toward what once felt good and steering us away from what once brought pain. Our very sense of self, then, is stitched together from choices remembered and rationalized, a narrative we are constantly editing to make sense of where we’ve been and where we are going—for better or worse.

Thus we are faced with the classic conundrum of free will. Does it exist if our decisions are already pre-formed by our emotions and past experiences? The answer depends entirely on how we view the source of those variables. If we choose to look at them as things beyond our control, then free will disappears. But if we choose to believe that we made the decisions that we did according to the information and resources available to us at the time, then free will is present. The real irony here is that whichever side of the fence we land on, we have, in fact, made a choice to be there.

Maybe then we can approach life’s big decisions with a little more levity, even the ones that aren’t easily reversible. The most difficult decisions are the ones where either all options look good or all look bad, and we agonize over how to maximize reward or minimize loss. The best choice may be simply to go with our gut and end the torture. Whether or not we believe in fate, our hearts have already placed us exactly where we need to be. We need only have faith in our ability to keep pruning ourselves in the future--cutting away what no longer belongs and nurturing what is essential.