Bookish Diversions: Reading as Help for Living

¶ Decisions, decisions! ’s 2018 book presents a method for processing decisions—not the easy kind (cherry pie or apple?) but the tough, –y, kind, with all the considerations and contingencies that spool out like thirty-seven balls of yarn rolling downhill. Do I: marry Sally? put Dad in the nursing home? change a policy that affects my coworkers’ retirement? move to Montreal? chuck it all and go into the car-wash business with my cousin Earl? Good luck! Wild problems often involve simple, binary choices—yes or no—but they contain countless concerns and consequences. Sally, Dad, coworkers, Montreal, Earl: to one degree or another, the variables multiple as we consider them and ramify in ways we can’t fully corral. To decide, says Johnson, we must manage to map the variables and then predict the outcomes. We’ll do so imperfectly, and we’ll get more wrong than right—whether the extent of our errors proves material or not. (The future ain’t easy, friends.) One help in this frau ... Read full article.