You are faced with decisions everyday.  I mean, maybe you’re not.  I don’t know you personally.  Do I? Well, look I don’t know which among you I know personally, and so it’s hard for me to say whether I know you personally. 

Hang on.

View fullsize

The people that I know in my personal life are faced with decisions everyday. Also, famous people. And fictional people. I mean, on the days that we’re aware of them. Fictional characters are probably faced with decisions everyday that they are conjured into existence by the forces of imagination. You’ll decide what they do, or the writers will or whatever, but we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s they have their own agency in making decisions.  I guess that’s the just the suspension of disbelief, like how spaceships routinely travel faster than light in fiction.  Imaginary things don’t have their own decisions to make. 

Wait.

View fullsize

I have made several decisions. At least I feel like I did.  It’s hard to know if your consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon from the interplay of several other factors.  Like how birds fly in formation, but it’s not planned or communicated, it’s just lots of little rules that add up to something that looks very professional, but is really just kind of an accident. Or maybe life is fiction and someone else is making all the decisions.  But then you’d figure that everyone would have a really exciting life and make all kinds of bold decisions. Which we don’t. Or I don’t.  Or haven’t. 

OK.

View fullsize

I just took an online quiz to determine my work productivity style, and I DECIDED to use the name Chad Bastard instead of my real name, Clint Bastard. See, now I’ve made another decision, to use a fake name for a second time. 

Making a decision is as easy as:

1. Ascertaining the necessity of choice.
2. Enumerating the possible.
3. Mentally enacting the scenario of the possible, extrapolating future variances of quality and impossiblizing highly negative futurestates through action/inaction.
4. Asserting the power of will to actualize positive futurestates.

Easy! Just remember the simple pneumonic device: AEMA, or Any Elephant Matters A Lot (leave off the last L for Leaving it off). Now, just remember this simple pneumonic, AEMALLOTLLFLIO, and you’re on your way to making decisions simply and with finesse.  

What’s that?  Too stupid to remember the simple instructions given above? There is an alternate stupid version of the Chad Bastard Decision Making System©.

1. Do the least boring thing.

See how stupid? Now you’ll be stuck always doing the least boring thing, which is bound to get stale after a while.  

In conclusion, making a decision is easy as long as you are stupid.