What Drives Our Decision-Making and How Do We Know When We’re Wrong?
This question addresses how one defines a good decision, which is connected to how one defines a good human life. This question also leads to evaluating which desires one chooses to follow.
The questions below are listed for Core Team members at Coworking locations who participated in a Conversation Matters discussion about the topic. Consider inviting a friend to coffee or lunch and see how far the conversation can go.
Don’t feel pressured to force the conversation further than your friend is open. Simply ask questions and listen well. Before you meet your friend for the conversation, pray for your friend and your time together: 1) pray that your friend is open to the conversation, 2) pray that you would grow to love your friend more, and 3) pray that you are used by God to share His undeserved love in compelling ways with your friend.
If you or your friend did not participate in a Conversation Matters you can still use the questions below, but consider a different starting point. For instance, you could begin with “I'm connected with an organization that creates discussion forums in Coworking locations and last month's topic was… [see the question above].” Then you could ask, “what do you think about that question?” Consider progressing the conversation with more questions listed below.
Questions:
What did you think about the lunch discussion last week?
Note: Consider whether your friend shared anything during the discussion that you could ask a specific followup question?
Note: If your friend did not share anything, then you can ask, “I didn’t hear you comment in the discussion. Did anyone share a perspective that was similar to yours?”
Did you feel like anything was shared by others that made you consider a new perspective on decision-making?
Note: Consider some the influences of our decisions: some things outside our control (biological, family, country, socio-economic context), fear, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (basic needs, psychological needs, self-fulfillment), our emotions, our relationships, our desires!
Do you think what we want/desire/love the most in the moment is what drives our decisions?
Note: Caleb made this comment when he shared his perspective. This came from some writings of Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine) - read more in the resources section listed below.
What happens when there are competing wants/desires/loves, how do you decide which one to follow?
Note: Caleb commented on the movie La La Land that posed a similar dilemma with the character’s choice between career and a loving relationship.
How do you judge a decision as good or bad? Another way to think about this is how do we know the desires we follow are good?
Note: Consider some of the comments during the discussion: “how it affects others"
Note: Caleb commented on the idea that a decision can’t be judged solely on whether the outcome was good or bad (we can make a good decision that doesn’t have a good outcome, and we can make bad decisions that turn out “alright”).
If a dNote:
ecision is good or bad based on something more than the outcome, then we need to consider what value filter helps us evaluate our desires. Most discussions included comments of family, culture, faith, worldview, and purpose in these value filters.
Note: Alternative questions:
“Have you followed a desire you knew wasn’t good? How did you determine this?”
“It seems like humans are filled with all kinds of desires with some being easier to determine as good or bad. When is it hard to determine whether a desire is good or bad?”
“How does your perspective on the purpose of humans influence your view of good choices?”
“Some people mentioned that the way they viewed the world (worldview) helped them define a good choice. This often includes the influences from our family, culture, experience, faith, and reason. Which influences you the most in the way you view the world (family, culture, experience, faith, or reason)?"
What desires/loves do you think we should follow? How do these greater desires/loves help prioritize the other desires/loves in our lives? What desire/love is worth the accumulation of all our life’s decisions?
Note: Relationships were discussed as a major factor in all the discussions.
Should relationships have priority in our lives?
When do we let certain relationships dictate our lives in unhealthy ways?
The Gospel according to decision-making - consider sharing this as your perspective on decision-making only if you think the conversation allows for it.
“One of the reasons I am a Christian is because I recognize that my desires are out of order. I love the wrong things and even the right things in the wrong order. Jesus says only when I love first God through belief Him, and love others as myself will my desires begin to be put in order.”
“Jesus taught that nothing else in life is worthy of all our life’s choices except God alone. Even our closest of loving relationships will disappoint us, fail us, and even hurt us. If we try to love anything or any person as if they will fulfill our ultimate desires, then we are setting ourselves up for deep disappointment. But Christianity doesn’t teach detachment from relationships is the answer, but the answer is when we love God most and then we can love others as we were intended.”
Quote - “Here, then, is the [Christian] message. Don’t love anything less; instead learn to love God more, and you will love other things with far more satisfaction. You won’t overprotect them, you won’t overexpect things from them. You won’t be constantly furious with them for not being what you hoped. Don’t stifle passionate love for anything; rather, redirect your greatest love toward God by loving him with your whole heart and loving him for himself, not just for what he can give you. Then, and only then, does the contentment start to come. That is the Christian view of satisfaction. It avoids the pitfalls of both the ancient strategy of tranquillity through detachment and the modern strategy of happiness through acquisition. It both explains and resolves the deep conundrum of our seemingly irremediable discontent.” Excerpt From: Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, chapter 4.
"Have you ever heard that perspective?"
Other helpful quotations on this topic:
Josiah Royce, a late Harvard Professor wrote, We need “devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable.” Excerpt From: Timothy Keller. “Making Sense of God.” (discussed in Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal, pp. 115–16).
“If you look into your heart to find your deep desires, you certainly will discover many of them. And you will discover something else—that they contradict one another. You may very much want a certain career, but then you fall in love with someone whom you also want very much. Because of the particular nature of both the career and the relationship, you realize you won’t be able to have both. What are you going to do? You might insist that one of these desires—for career or love—must be deeper and more “you,” but that’s naive. Why assume that your internal desires are arranged in such an orderly way? Francis Spufford writes that you are “a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonise: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to, at the very same time. You’re equipped . . . for farce or even tragedy more than you are for happy endings.”Excerpt From: Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, chapter 6.
“Augustine did not see our problems as stemming only from a lack of love. He also observed that the heart’s loves have an order to them, and that we often love less important things more and the more important things less. Therefore, the unhappiness and disorder of our lives are caused by the disorder of our loves. A just and good person “is also a person who has [rightly] ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more).”32 How does this work? There is nothing wrong with loving your work, but if you love it more than your family, then your loves are out of order and you may ruin your family. Or if you love making money more than you love justice, then you will exploit your employees, again, because your loves are disordered.” Excerpt From: Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, chapter 4.
How do you love God? “The heart of the Christian faith is the simple Gospel message of sin and grace. Because we fail to love God and our neighbor, we sin, and for God to forgive our sin, the Son of God became mortal and graciously died in our place on the cross. This is an offensive idea to many people, but for the moment just consider the two ways this message can bring about the love relationship with God, which solves the human dilemma.
First, the knowledge of our sin softens our hearts. If you were to raise a child and work your fingers to the bone to send that child to college, and the child only occasionally sent you a Christmas card and never gave you the time of day, that would be wrong. It’s wrong because the child owes not just deference but love. Now, if there is a God who created us and keeps us alive every minute, then the love we owe God would be infinitely greater. To not love him supremely would be infinitely worse. If you believe that, you begin to see how much we have wronged him. It begins to draw your heart outward toward him in humility and grief.
Second, the knowledge of his grace ignites our hearts. If you want to forgive someone who has wrongfully cost you a great deal of money and can’t afford to pay you back, you must absorb and pay the debt yourself. If God was going to forgive us, he had to pay the debt we owed himself. And Jesus Christ pays it by going to the cross. Keep in mind that outside of salt and a couple of minerals, everything we eat has died so that we may live. If you are eating bread, not only did the grain die, but the bread has to be broken into pieces. If the bread stays whole, you starve and you fall apart. If the bread is broken into pieces and you take it in, then you live. When Jesus Christ says, “I am the bread of life. . . broken for you,” (John 6:35; Luke 22:19) he is saying: “I am God become breakable, killable, vulnerable. I die that you might live. I am broken so you can be whole.”
Only if you see him doing this all for you—does that begin to change your heart. He suffered and died for your sake. Now out of joy we can love him just for his sake, just for the beauty of who he is and what he has done. You can’t force your heart to love. A kind of vague god, a god of love, an abstract god will never change your heart. This is what will change it, draw it off its inordinate attachments to other things, and turn it away from the food that spoils. Someday, then, you will be able to say, “Because your love is better than life . . . I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you” (Psalm 63:3a,5). This is “it”—or at least its foretaste (1 John 3:1–3).” Excerpt From: Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, chapter 4.