Chapter 1

My sister once told me that when making decisions you should always go with the one that you’ll regret not doing the most five years down the line. Naturally, there are lots of decisions one is forced to affront in the course of a day, but such decisions are clearly not the ones she had in mind. Rather, it was of those big decisions that seem to linger constantly on your mind that take days, and even weeks at times, to figure out. The ones that are so incapacitating and so futile one way or another. It never leaves your thoughts, it constantly sits there and forces you to think about it whether you like it or not. During work or in the shower, it forces you to make a pros-and-cons list only to deem it utterly useless because either way you won’t be completely satisfied, and hey, what’s life without satisfaction? Such decisions are those that leave you rather helpless.

I knew her advice was sound. I knew it was reasonable, tried and true. But I couldn’t help myself to those immediate gratification choices. Those end decisions were perhaps a bit naïve in hindsight, usually caused by a momentary lapse in judgment. They were usually under the very reasonable eight-year-old girl decision-making method of “but I wanna”. I mean, you can’t be reasonable all the time, right? I’ll admit, perhaps the “but I wanna” argument shouldn’t win on a regular basis, but it happens on the occasion. However, in some cases, the “choose the one you’ll regret not doing the most five years down the line” argument is indeed the best decision maker. It is indeed, the best argument and advice anyone can give. With a lifetime of decision-making, what best method of reasoning than to go with the one you won’t regret later on? If everything went perfectly, we wouldn’t live a life of regrets, but rather we would know what we wanted and what’s best for us and constantly go for it. Of course, that’s also assuming that we know what we want now.