How to make a hard decision when clarity and impatience feel the same
I think I need to let a loyal long-timer go; how do I know whether this is clarity or impatience?
Question 21 of the Index
You have been carrying this one for a while, and the reason you cannot move is not that you lack a fact. If a fact would settle it you would have gone and got the fact. It will not move because two very different states feel exactly the same from the inside: knowing, and being tired of not knowing.
Clarity and impatience produce the same sentence. Both say it is time. Both arrive with relief attached, and the relief is the part that fools people, because a decision that lightens you the moment you imagine making it has told you something about your appetite for the waiting rather than about the decision.
There is a way to separate them that does not require more thinking. Ask what would have to be true for the opposite choice to be right, and see how fast the answer comes. Clarity can describe the other side in detail and still choose. Impatience cannot be bothered to, and calls that decisiveness.
The other test is time-shaped. Clarity survives being asked to wait two more weeks. Impatience treats the two weeks as an insult. If the delay feels intolerable rather than merely inconvenient, the thing you are trying to end may be the discomfort rather than the situation.
Torn between two choices
Most advice on how to make a difficult decision assumes the trouble is missing information, so it hands you a method: list the options and score them. If you are torn between two choices and the scores came out level, or came out clear and you still did not move, the method has done what it can, and what remains is something a score cannot settle.
Should I trust my gut? Sometimes. A gut that can describe the option it is turning down is usually worth trusting. A gut that cannot, and is in a hurry, is usually impatience. That is the test above, and it holds for a big life decision as much as for a small one.
Nobody can tell you how to know if it is the right decision before you make it, and anyone who claims to is guessing. What you can know is whether you are choosing or escaping. ‘Help me decide’ is a fair thing to ask for. The chair below will not decide for you, but it will ask the question that shows which of the two you are doing.
You did not come here for someone else’s decision. Put yours in, in your own words, and see what the question underneath it turns out to be.
No account, no card, one exchange. Yours to keep.