How Do You Prefer Your Pain?
How Choosing A Downside Could Lead To Easier Decision Making
Damn. It’s going to need surgery.
About a month ago I tweaked my knee playing disc golf. Yeah, you read that right, I hurt myself throwing frisbees.
Getting older is delightful.
When it happened, I figured I would give it a few days to see if I would start to feel better. After a couple days of limping around, I figured it was time to get it checked out.
I set an appointment with an orthopedic doctor which led to a leg brace and an MRI. I found out yesterday morning that the MRI revealed a torn meniscus and it will require surgery in order to heal properly.
The alternative to this surgery is a quicker onset of arthritis, which will equate to chronic pain and trouble walking when I’m older. I’m 48 now, with a little more arthritis in my knees than the average person so I want to do what I can to slow the onset of this.
Both choices seem pretty undesirable, but right now I’m leaning toward the surgery.
I don’t want to undergo surgery. Who does? I’ve never been under anesthesia before, so the whole not waking up thing is in the back of my mind. Also, there are the chances of infection and clotting that every cutting procedure brings.
I’m scared.
What I’m more scared of though, is acting in fear. Or worse, not acting at all and having a lower quality of life as a result of this inaction.
This situation, is like so many others in life. We try to decide what action will be the best to take given the information we have at the time. Usually, the choices we have are not perfect. We’re trying to decide which shitty path to take out of the shitty choices we have available at any given time.
There is a cost to every decision we make.
Realizing this may help you to make better and faster decisions. You don’t have to wait for a perfect solution, because it likely doesn’t exist.
Rather, you can choose which type of suffering you prefer.
Understanding that every decision is tainted with a downside allows you to move more freely through life knowing that an ideal solution may never come. Instead, you’re left deciding between two shitty decisions. Both contain suffering on some level.
The point I’m trying to make is, usually in life our choices are really decisions based on what suffering we would prefer to endure. In other words, our choices are not pain-free or free from sacrifice.
We must choose which endured pain will lead to the most positive outcome?
How do you want to suffer?
This may seem like a morbid question to ask, but it really gets to the root of the decision.
How can you optimize the pain that you will inevitably endure so that it leads to at least one of your best outcomes for a situation?
What are you willing to risk?
Avoiding risk is like trying to get the wind to stop blowing. Good luck with that.
Often, the shit in the shit sandwich of decision making relates to the direct risk we will have to endure in order to get to our desired result.
As you know, no decision is void of risk.
There is always a downside.
What risk are you willing to take to get to the upside?
What risk can you survive, even if the plan goes to hell?
What is the risk of doing nothing at all?
Inaction comes at a cost too and it usually looks like an erosion in the quality of our lives. If you don’t clean your room, it will eventually get messy.
If I am to ignore the doctor’s suggestion to get this knee surgery, it will likely lead to knee pain that will prevent me from enjoying my life. It may even lead to knock-on effects that ultimately end my life - lack of exercise, poor mental state, reduced social interactions, declining physical health due to lack of physical activity . . .
Getting the surgery presents immediate risk to my health - there is a chance that things won’t go right. Worst case, I die now instead of later, with bad knees.
By focusing on the suffering I’m willing to endure, I can more easily make my decision.
The thought of me being an old, immobile man, scares the hell out of me.
I’m an active person. Movement is my medicine. If this is taken away, I will have to face some real challenges in reformatting my entire life. It could lead to years, maybe decades, of suffering.
Acutely, the thought of dying or being maimed scares the shit out of me too. Based on past surgeries as a collective whole, this risk is relatively low, but not zero.
I’d rather roll the dice on a healthier old-age and opt for the surgery.
I’m still afraid, but this seems to be the most desirable path forward out of the shitty choices I currently have.
If I make it out the other side of this surgery without complication, there will be a definite improvement in the quality of my life. As it stands now, I feel pain in each step I take on my right leg.
Something needs to be done, or I will have to get used to being in pain on the daily. Even if it does heal to be less painful, the doctor believes that the excessive arthritis that I have for my age, will worsen, leading me back to my fear about living my older years with limited mobility.
In the meantime, I have about a month to find another, perhaps less shitty solution. For now, I’m going with shitty choice A — to put on my big boy pants and get the surgery over with.
Considering the risk and suffering that you are willing to endure could be a better framework for decision making. By simply focusing on what we want, we fail to recognize an important part of the decision making process - the pain.
The downsides are real and we need to account for them. It’s not just upsides we have to consider. There is a cost in every choice we make.
Pain is the cost of getting to where you want to be.