Decisions, Decisions

Having made so many over my three score and ten, I no longer fret about making poor decisions.

Instead, I worry about making any decision, because each one immediately collides head-on with 57 contradictory pieces of timeless wisdom, each delivered by someone who sounded absolutely certain.

This is one of the great design flaws of civilization.

People say, “Experience is the best teacher.” Nobody who says this has twigged to the fact that advice is self-cancelling.

Take Winston Churchill’s famous encouragement: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Excellent. Stirring. Heroic. Right up there with that plucky, often cited and/or parodied British Ministry of Information slogan from 1939 as the Second World War was getting underway: “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Suppose you’re having a terrible year. You lose your job. Your furnace dies. The dog eats your tax return. You accidentally “reply all” to an email containing the sentence, “The boss is a total moron and this meeting should have been a pamphlet.”

Even when you’re down to nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat, Churchill would urge you on to fight on the beaches, etc., and nevah surrendah. You might even hear Big Ben chiming in the background.

Makes perfect sense. Hell is not somewhere you want to establish residency.

But then another equally respected philosopher — possibly a cowboy, engineer or grumpy uncle — offers the First Law of Holes:

“When you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

Also worthy advice. From my reporting days at the Saskatchewan legislature in the late seventies and early eighties, I remember then Progressive Conservative leader Grant Devine proudly deploying his subversion of the maxim in attacks on whatever the NDP government was doing under Premier Allan Blakeney. Seemed to work because Devine replaced Blakeney as premier in the 1982 election.

Devine’s version of the adage, which reversed its meaning along Churchillian lines, was folksier: “Don’t yell ‘Whoa’ in a mud hole.”

He was also fond of the less Churchillian “giv’ her snoose, Bruce,” which a dozen or so corrupt members of his government promptly proceeded to do in defrauding Saskatchewan taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Still, the “whoa” quote always played well with crowds at rallies. As with continuing to dig, stopping in a hole to look around is almost never the solution unless you’re employed by a mining company or hiding pirate treasure.

But mired in a hole is exactly where we’ve wound up by listening to seemingly sensible advice. One authority tells you to continue. The other says to stop immediately.

This is why older people ensconced at shopping mall dining courts sometimes stare into the distance with an expression suggesting they’ve misplaced not only their car keys but the entire operating manual for existence. Should I stay or should I go buy another scratch-and-win?

The contradictions don’t stop there.

“Look before you leap.”

Absolutely.

Unless you remember: “He who hesitates is lost.”

Apparently, the ideal decision-making process involves carefully assessing all risks in under one-tenth of a second.

Then there’s teamwork. “Many hands make light work.”

Wonderful.

Until: “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

At what precise number does a helpful volunteer become a broth spoiler? Five? Seven? Does the Department of Agriculture maintain official broth-density standards? I’ve searched. If so, they’re keeping suspiciously quiet.

Then we encounter perhaps the greatest contradiction in history.

“Practice makes perfect.”

Wonderful. Again.

Until you bump into: “Nobody’s perfect.”

Then why have I been spending all these bloody hours practising? This sounds suspiciously like a pyramid scheme.

Money advice is equally deranged. “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

Ka-Ching!

Until: “You can’t take it with you.”

So the correct financial strategy appears to be saving every penny until the exact moment you die, whereupon fiscal responsibility becomes somebody else’s prerogative and the government arrives to scoop up the majority share you were merely minding on its behalf.

Parents are no better.

They tell children, “Always tell the truth.”

Five minutes later the telephone rings. “Tell them I’m not home.”

The child naturally concludes adulthood is an advanced degree in creative nonfiction.

Social advice is impossible. “Never judge a book by its cover.”

But always “dress for success.”

So other people shouldn’t judge appearances, but you’d better wear a blazer just in case they ignore the first rule. And always wear clean underwear in case you wind up at the hospital or the morgue. What would the coroner think?

Our grandparents had to cope with these contradictions, too, but only in moderation.

If ol’ Gramps wanted advice, he asked his father, the barber, or perhaps the fellow who occupied the cracker barrel at the general store and had strong opinions about everything from crop rotation to the League of Nations.

Between them they might produce six contradictory opinions.

Annoying, yes. But survivable.

Today, before breakfast, you can receive advice from your physician, three podcasts, five social media influencers, two bestselling authors, an Olympic athlete, a billionaire entrepreneur, a mindfulness guru, an AI assistant, your smartwatch, and a 23-year-old YouTuber who begins every sentence with, “Nobody tells you this, but …” or “Doctors don’t want you to know this, but …”

By 8:15 in the morning you’ve been informed that you should wake up at 4:30. Unless you’re a night owl, in which case sleeping until nine is apparently the hallmark of genius.

Drink coffee.

No — always delay coffee for 90 minutes.

Take a cold plunge.

Protect your nervous system.

Run every day.

Walking is superior.

Lift weights.

Stretch.

Actually, don’t stretch.

Eat breakfast.

Skip breakfast.

Eat six small meals a day.

Fast for sixteen hours.

Carbohydrates are essential.

Carbohydrates are the devil.

Butter is poison.

Sugar is poison.

Seed oils are poison.

Stress is poison.

Reading this list is poison.

At this point, avoiding advice would require entering the Witness Protection Program. Experts now disagree professionally. Entire careers are built around contradicting last year’s bestseller.

One nutrition expert publishes a book proving blueberries are the fountain of youth. Six months later. another publishes a bestseller arguing blueberries are worthless fibre benefiting from an aggressive but groundless public relations campaign.

The first expert appears on podcasts defending blueberries. The second appears on different podcasts exposing blueberries. The blueberry sits quietly in the produce aisle wondering what it did to deserve this.

Technology was supposed to simplify life. Instead, it has become an industrial-scale advice delivery system.

Your phone informs you to stand. Then to breathe. Then to hydrate. Then to meditate. Then to move more. Then to reduce your screen time. This final instruction arrives as a notification on your screen.

The phone’s strategy for reducing screen time is to keep interrupting you with reminders about it.

Eventually, your refrigerator joins the conversation. It politely announces that you’re low on milk. The milk carton proudly proclaims that it’s lactose-free. The internet explains that lactose was never the real issue.  Someone else says dairy has been unfairly maligned. Another insists human beings were never designed to drink milk after infancy.

The cow has wisely hired a publicist.

Selling your house?

“Keep it on the market as long as it takes. It only takes one buyer to come along.”

“Take it off the market after a month or two. Anything longer smacks of desperation.”

“Buy new appliances to make the place more attractive.”

“Don’t spend any money on a kitchen reno. The buyer will just rip everything out anyway.”

End result: 

I look inside myself and see my heart is black. I see my red door, I must have it painted black.

Speaking of which. Relationships, naturally, don’t escape the confusion.

Everyone knows absence makes the heart grow fonder. Then why does another saying insist, “Out of sight, out of mind?” Which organ is running this operation — the heart or the brain? And more to the point: Will I see you in September or lose you to a summer love?

Exercise offers no refuge.

“No pain, no gain.”

“Listen to your body. If it hurts, stop.”

My body has spent the better part of six decades recommending pie, comfortable chairs and weather-appropriate naps. If I listened to it any more closely, I’d qualify as upholstered furniture, half off at Leon’s (before taxes). No money down till 2029. (Offer excludes best sellers, clearance items and select premium brands.)

At some point, all this wisdom merges into a single philosophical traffic jam.

One voice says, “Fortune favours the bold.”

Another insists, “Discretion is the better part of valour.”

A third reminds you that “Good things come to those who wait.”

A fourth warns, “You snooze, you lose.”

A fifth says, “Trust your instincts.”

A sixth explains that your instincts are riddled with cognitive biases.

By now you’ve forgotten your name, let alone what the original decision was for. Usually it was whether to buy bananas. Which is why older people can spend 45 minutes standing motionless in a supermarket aisle.

I used to figure they were counting change or comparing cereal prices. Now that I’ve joined life’s express checkout line, I know that the other Statlers and Waldorfs are actually trying to determine whether breakfast remains the most important meal of the day, whether intermittent fasting extends life, whether eggs are miraculous or tiny cholesterol grenades this month, whether coffee is medicine or a dangerous stimulant, whether bananas contain too much sugar or not enough potassium, and whether organic produce is healthier unless it’s imported, in which case local is better unless local used pesticides.

By the time we’ve reconciled all the available evidence, it’s lunchtime. Which, according to at least three experts, should probably be skipped. And so it’s probably just as well that I forgot to pick up the bananas. Even if my wife doesn’t think so.

Bottom line: humanity has reached Peak Advice. We no longer suffer from a shortage of wisdom. We suffer from wisdom congestion.

Every conceivable course of action is endorsed by an expert, condemned by another expert, explained in a TED Talk, debated on a podcast and summarized in equally cogent opposing newspaper editorials written by two drunks at a bus depot until most of us are of two minds about making up our mind, on the fence about going with our gut, up in the air about taking the plunge and dragging our feet on biting the bullet.

As someone unlikely to cross that bridge when I come to it unless I know what’s on the other side, I’ve long believed that it’s better to make no decision than a bad one. But what if that itself is a bad decision?

So here’s my advice for the ages: Don’t take my advice.