{"id":56371,"date":"2022-01-13T18:12:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-13T22:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=56371"},"modified":"2022-01-28T12:58:51","modified_gmt":"2022-01-28T16:58:51","slug":"random-decision-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/random-decision-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Decision-Making: Appeal to Chance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What do you do when faced with a difficult choice in life? Do you ever just make decisions at random? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, the best way to make a difficult choice in life is to appeal to chance. By making a few random, intentionally suboptimal decisions, you can discover opportunities you couldn\u2019t see before and get unstuck<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is why random decision-making<\/a> is sometimes the best way to go. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Power of Randomness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To move past dead ends, sometimes it makes sense to appeal to chance. Just like a traveler who points to a globe to decide where to live, computers act randomly when they don\u2019t know what else to do. Such behavior seems like an irrational human quirk, but pure randomness has several unexpected uses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sufficient amount of randomness in your real-life problem-solving can lead you down paths you would have never chosen, some of which lead to greater success. In our dead-end job example, a random change, whether it be a new job or a new home, would force you out of your comfortable but unfulfilling local maximum and give you a chance to find a better \u201cnew normal.\u201d Your living conditions may become temporarily worse, but unforeseen new opportunities to improve your life will hopefully leave you better off in the long run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In How to Live<\/em><\/a>, Derek Sivers says a fulfilling life<\/a> is entirely<\/em> built around randomness. Sivers argues that the world is already mostly random\u2014we assume that the world is made up of countless series of causes and effects, but in reality, it\u2019s mostly coincidences and chance. In the grand scheme of things, making your decisions randomly won\u2019t take much away from your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sivers points out that random decision-making lets you encounter valuable experiences that you never would have intentionally chosen. According to Sivers, these random experiences will transform you<\/strong>. You\u2019ll no longer base your identity or self-worth on your career or the way you dress since you didn\u2019t choose them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, he argues that by making your decisions randomly, you can live a life entirely without ego. You never need to worry about whether or not you\u2019re making the responsible choice, or if you\u2019re doing everything you can to ensure a good future. Instead, you\u2019re free to live wholly in the present, enjoying life as it is instead of how it could be. This is an intentionally extreme argument\u2014How to Live<\/em> offers 27 extreme manifestos like this that all contradict one another, to show how no one guiding philosophy is capable of fully capturing the complexity of life. It probably wouldn\u2019t be wise to make all your decisions randomly as Sivers recommends here, but it\u2019s possible that adding randomness to your life in moderation will ease the burdensome expectations you put on yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you do when faced with a difficult choice in life? Do you ever just make decisions at random? Sometimes, the best way to make a difficult choice in life is to appeal to chance. By making a few random, intentionally suboptimal decisions, you can discover opportunities you couldn\u2019t see before and get unstuck. Here is why random decision-making is sometimes the best way to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":6502,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,25],"tags":[549],"class_list":["post-56371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","category-statistics","tag-algorithms-to-live-by","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nRandom Decision-Making: Appeal to Chance - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"To move past dead ends, sometimes it's best to appeal to chance. 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