The great majority of all our decisions are not between right and wrong, where there is only one good pathway to take.

Our decisions are often between one good option and another good option. Sometimes they are between five bad options and no good options. Sometimes we have no idea how many options we have, and we just pick something that’s good enough.

I have had the hardest time making decisions regarding my kids’ extracurricular activities. I am actually grateful I live in a smaller town so there are less options. But even with the few options I have, I feel like I have to figure out how to optimized my child’s potential so that they can both be happy and also become the most capable that they can be.

But choosing extracurricular activities is not an optimization problem, where there is one best answer. I don’t have the necessary information to optimize, because my kids are young and I don’t know if they will like something or not. They have to try it out first. And skill is not just built on natural talent, but also grit and determination, so sometimes I have no idea what a child will actually be good at. There are too many factors, many of them are just chance.

It’s not that my child and I will choose the path that will make them the best version of themselves; we’re just choosing between different versions, and there is no way to determine which version is better.

Acrobatics, choir, drama, soccer, basketball, swimming, art, coding, crafting, fishing, archery–any option is fine, really. There is no right answer. They just need to try something, hopefully find one thing that they sort of like, learn how to work hard and do their best. It doesn’t matter if we decide to play soccer, or take dance lessons, or whatever.

I do think there can be some choices that would be problematic: involving my child in too many extracurricular activities, for example, so that we have more to do than we are able to accomplish. Another problematic option would to have my kids do no extracurricular activities and then give them unlimited screen time.

But in the middle, there are just a ton of options and I can’t tell which was is the absolute best, so we just choose something and hope for the best and make adjustments as needed.

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Relatedly, this attitude has helped with menu indecision. I used to view menus as an optimizing problem where I would try to order the thing on the menu that would give me the most pleasure for the least amount of money. But I didn’t have the information that made this possible (usually I haven’t tried anything on the menu yet). So I stopped viewing ordering food as an optimization problem.

It’s an exercise in exploration instead: I’m just going to try things out. I will dislike things. That’s part of the uncertainty of life.