Making decisions always limits future options. Choosing one of two forks in the road precludes taking the other fork without added costs of backtracking and starting over. Moving into the future, the decision space is always changing. In some ways it collapses because choices not made disappear and become unavailable. But at the same time, the decision space expands and the chosen path is traveled.
I love thinking about making decisions at the start. Clean sheet of paper and infinite possibilities. Yet that is an entirely artificial metaphor. We always find ourselves in the middle of the story. And here there are many constraints that are the consequences made previously, often by others. Whenever I hear discussions about the US Federal Budget deficits, I think about these constraints. Large systems have been created over the years (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) to prevent the widespread poverty and lack of medical care that were once commonplace among the elderly. Having created these systems, it becomes unthinkable (impossible?) to end them even as they require larger and larger resources every year. Having been created with no built in limits or budgets, these entitlements grow and grow, limited only by the ingenuity of those in my industries, medical care and drug development.
The decisions made early on, when these programs were smaller, have led to unintended consequences which could be catastrophic in a few years or decades. But now it seems that changing paths to avoid these outcomes may not be among the choices that can be made by the government.
I wonder whether there is an inevitability to certain outcomes once choices are made and systems created. Are these some kind of local minimum from which escape is impossible? Must it be the catastrophe that opens up new decision space? I use the metaphor of digging yourself into a hole. The hole gets so deep that one can no longer climb out, so that the more you dig, the deeper and more inescapable the hole becomes.
I can’t quite explain why we feel compelled to keep on digging when its clear that the path does not lead out but only deeper.
