The First Question

Given as I'm supposed to be honest, I guess the first thing we ought to consider is why guys like me don't always make the best decisions of which we are capable. It's not like we make these massive blunders on a daily basis. It's that the most effective or intelligent response isn't always the one we want. Stuff like beer, being horny (did I just repeat myself?), ambition or lack thereof, human stuff, keeps distorting our judgment.

You know how you act different at work than at church? You know why? (of course you do…it's just one of those times I have to give some background into how I describe things) Each set of behaviors is a compromise between ego-who you think you are (as opposed to self-who you are) and what you think you can get away with under the circumstances. This compromise is called a persona-Greek for "mask". There is a persona for each distinct identifiable scenario in your life and each persona expresses the compromise it represents in its judgments and decisions. This results in decisions that are biased in that they are based on a fragment of your life. Decisions that often have unexpected effects in other areas of your life…unexpected not because you couldn't see them coming but because you didn't.

Fact is, the only reason you can yell at yourself over bad decisions is because the guy doing the yelling isn't the guy making the decisions. That's a persona too, the one you look at yourself through. And that's about the only time you bring him out.

It seems to me that a lot of the sub-optimum decisions we think we make are really one persona second-guessing another. If you made the best decision you could, learn, let it go and move to the next thing.

But did you make the best decision you could, "best" meaning "left you stronger and/or more capable than any other decision you could have made?" Ummmmm…

Because dammit, the persona we view ourselves through was right. We could have done better. We could have stopped to think. We could have considered other important relationships. What we actually did think about, though, was those things we thought we had to. The things we didn't consider just weren't a high enough priority at the time.

You know, if in some situation you consistently miss doing the right thing, then doing the right thing isn't your goal. At least not in that situation. And if we deny it, we can't take steps to change it.

Now. For stuff more specific to guys like me.

I'm going to use cigarettes as an example for two reasons: it displays the basic pattern without going so deeply into my personal business as to embarrass me, and because I just lit one.

I remember when I started smoking, about 30 years ago. You and your boys, cool and adult as hell, cussing and smoking. Shortness of breath only lasted a few minutes after the cigarette. After a few weeks you didn't notice it anymore. We'd already heard cigarettes were bad for you, but we figured the benefits of smoking outweighed the incremental damage.

And there, in a sentence, is the problem. The perceived immediate benefits are judged to be more important than the immediate incremental damage suffered. It's like seeing life as a series of snapshots, judging each frame with no reference to the others, instead of as a movie. We didn't consider what would happen when the damage increments happened more frequently, or even before we fully recovered from the previous one.

I still smoke, by the way. It's addiction, of course, but it's habit as well-which may be worse. Our fundamental, reflexive habits were formed when we were young and didn't know shit.