Choices Make Versions

There was a day when I had to choose, and I am not going to tell you what the choice was, because the what does not matter, and giving it to you would be a kind of cheating, a way of earning your agreement through the specifics instead of earning it through the shape. What matters is that I could see both versions of myself on the other side of the choice. Two hallways branching off the same door. I picked one. The other one stopped existing. And I think about the version of me who walked down the other hallway more than is probably useful, and the thinking is the thing I want to try to describe, because I do not have a clean word for it, and the not-having-a-word is most of why I am writing this.

I have a strange relationship to time, and I want to name it plainly because I think it matters for what follows.

I can see the next version of me very clearly. Unreasonably clearly, if I am honest. The person I could become if I made different choices starting tomorrow. I can see his mornings. I can see what his relationships look like. I can see what he has quietly stopped tolerating. He is a silhouette at the end of a hallway, and the silhouette is so distinct that I can almost make out the shape of his hands, which is, I suspect, too much resolution for a person to have on a future that does not yet exist, and which has, more than once, been its own kind of problem, because a future that vivid starts to feel like a place you are already behind on.

And I am bad at holding the past. Embarrassingly bad. I do not remember in any reliable way what I was like two years ago. I have forward vision, and I have a thin blank space where the memory of the earlier me should be, and I am making decisions in the gap between those two things, and I have started to notice that this is a weird way to live, and the noticing is recent, and the noticing is not yet a solution.

The hardest day of my life was the day I chose to become someone else. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet way. In a way where I had to leave people behind and not turn it into a story where I was the hero, because the version of me I was trying to become did not start where I was standing, it started somewhere I had not been yet, and getting there meant leaving, and leaving meant being the person who left, and the person who left could not redeem himself by telling a better story about the leaving. The leaving was what it was. The people I left were real. The becoming, such as it was, happened anyway, but it did not make the leaving retroactively kind, and I have had to learn to let the leaving sit, unredeemed, as part of who I am now, and the sitting is some of the private work I do most nights before sleep.

I keep thinking about this. About choice. About what it actually is.

Every time I try to say it out loud it comes out sounding like a motivational poster and I hate it. I genuinely hate it, because inside my body the thing does not feel motivational, it feels mechanical, obvious, almost boring, the way gravity feels boring to the person who is currently being pulled toward the earth. It is not a truth that improves in the telling. It is a truth that contracts in the telling, and the contracting is how I know I am saying it wrong, because the real shape of it is not inspirational, it is just accurate, and accuracy without drama does not sell, and I do not know how to write about this without the drama creeping in at the edges.

So let me try to say it the way my brain actually processes it.

Choice is the smallest unit of identity. It is the atom. Everything I am is built out of choices, and almost none of them are the dramatic ones. The dramatic ones are a small minority. The real ones are the small choices, the ones I pretend do not count, the soft yes when the honest answer was no, the text I sent, the text I did not send, the room I walked into, the room I avoided, the moment I let the conversation drift past the thing that was actually important because saying the important thing would have required me to stop performing the version of myself I had been performing for the last two hours. I am choosing all day long. I am choosing when I swear I am on autopilot. Especially then. The autopilot is a choice. It is one I made so long ago that the making is not available to me anymore, but it is still a choice, and it is still producing the life I am currently in, a line at a time.

Choices are not right or wrong, and I know that sounds like the opening of a relativist argument and it is not what I mean. What I mean is that each choice produces a version of me, and one version stays, and the other versions stop existing, and the versions that stop existing are not morally worse than the one that stayed, they are only different, they would have left different trails, woken up with different regrets, carried different weights in different places. The version of me who said the thing out loud and the version who swallowed it are both versions of me. One of them got to live. One of them did not. And whichever one got to live is the one who has to keep choosing now, which is how the whole thing compounds, which is why it matters so much what a person chooses on an average Wednesday, because the average Wednesday is where the identity is built, and the weekends are where you notice, if you are paying attention, what the Wednesdays have made.

This is not motivational. I want to be clear. This is, from inside my body, something closer to physics, and the physics does not care whether I like the result. The physics is going to produce a version of me, today, by the end of today, whether or not I was awake for the producing. The question is only whether I was awake for it, and most days I am not, and most people are not, and the not-being-awake is, I now think, the thing.

Most people are not free. I do not mean this politically. I do not mean it philosophically. I mean it mechanically. Most people are not actually choosing, because the choosing is happening below the surface, driven by patterns, by moods, by fears they never named, by old pains that got dressed up as personality over time and now appear, to the person wearing them, as the shape of the self. Think about how you respond, automatically, to conflict. To someone being disappointed in you. To silence. Those responses feel like you. They feel like identity. They are not. They are repetitions that calcified into habits and got promoted to personality traits somewhere along the way, and the promotion happened under conditions you probably cannot fully reconstruct, and you have been running the same program, against the same inputs, long enough that the program and the self have become indistinguishable from the inside.

The most radical thing a person can do, and I mean radical in the old sense, root-level, is to slow down enough to see the moment before the automatic yes. To feel the impulse rise and not obey it. To sit in the gap, the small uncomfortable gap between stimulus and response, long enough that the gap begins to feel like a place rather than an emergency.

Freedom is that gap. That is it. It is not loud. It is not dramatic. It is a small window in which I can catch myself about to do the thing I always do and ask, honestly, whether I want to do it, or whether the program is running. Most people never find the gap. They live their whole lives inside the automatic response and they call it fate, or personality, or just who they are, and I understand it, because the gap is uncomfortable, and the gap requires ownership, and the automatic response is so much cheaper because it does not require ownership, it just happened, it is not your fault, you did not choose.

Except you did. You chose not to look. That is also a choice. It goes all the way down. I am sorry. I have been trying to find a way out of this and I have not found one.

My brain pattern-matches across scales, and I cannot help noticing that almost every major turning point I can think of is, structurally, someone finding the gap.

The oldest version of this story, in whatever framework a person uses for that kind of story, is someone who chooses knowledge over safety. Who chooses to know even though the knowing costs them everything. The cost is exile. The cost is pain. The cost is becoming a person who knows things they cannot unknow. That is the oldest choice because it is the most fundamental one. Stay comfortable or wake up. And nobody tells you, before the choice, that waking up is permanent. You cannot go back to sleep. You cannot unchoose knowledge. That is part of the deal. That is, maybe, the whole deal.

Washington chose to leave power, which I think is actually harder than the choice to fight, because fighting is dramatic and leaving is quiet. He walked away from something he could have kept, and built something that outlasted him instead of something that worshipped him. That is the gap. He found the space between I could keep this and I should let this go and he picked the second, and most people in his position would not have, and the world is the shape it is partly because he did.

Ali chose conviction over comfort and paid for it with the prime years of his career. He chose to be hated now in order to be honest forever. That is the gap. The automatic response was to comply. The chosen response cost him everything and made him everything. The cost is part of why it mattered. If it had not cost him, it would not have been a choice, it would have been an opinion, and opinions do not change what a person becomes.

And then there is me. And you. And the choices that do not make history books but do make our lives. Someone you love choosing to stay when leaving would have been easier. Someone you used to be choosing to leave when staying would have been safer. The person at the desk deciding, on a Wednesday in December, to tell the truth in a meeting where the truth is unwelcome. The person in the car deciding not to send the text. The person in the bed deciding, against the pull of everything easier, to turn toward the other person and say the harder thing. These moments are not smaller than the historical ones. They are the same size. They are just private. They are the same mechanism, operating at a scale nobody will ever honor, and they are producing lives, every day, in rooms no one will write about, and the lives are accumulating into the shape of the world whether we notice or not.

If I am going to be practical about this, which I should be, because otherwise this is just me having feelings in a text file, here is what I have found.

If you want to make better choices, do not start with theory. Start with memory. Look at the choices you have already made, and look at the life they have built, and look for the pattern. There is a pattern. There is always a pattern. Look at what it cost. Look at what it gave. Reflection is the operation that turns experience into signal. Without reflection, experience is just time passing, and time passing does not teach anything, it only accumulates, and accumulation is not the same as growth.

When you stand at a new fork, try to imagine the life on the other side of each choice. Imagine the version of you who has to carry that choice. Imagine his mornings. His relationships. What he will quietly regret at two in the morning. What will, finally, feel clean. If you can see even a little of that, you can choose more honestly. If you do not like what you see, choose differently. That is the whole thing. That is literally the whole thing. And it is also brutally hard, and people who write about it tend to make it sound clean, and it is not clean, and the not-clean is where I want to be honest, because the cleanness is the thing that makes people read essays like this and change nothing, because the cleanness tells them there is a technique, and there is not a technique, there is only the choosing, again and again, at a cost, without applause.

Choosing, every day, to align with the version of yourself you actually want to become is exhausting. It is so much easier to not choose. To let the day happen. To let the loop decide. To let the automatic response run and call it your personality and never look at the gap. I understand the easier path. I have taken it. I take it most days, in small ways I am only now starting to see.

If you want a different life, you have to author it. There is no other way. I keep looking for another way. There isn’t one.

I heard someone say once that the most successful people carry fewer thoughts each day than everyone else, and I am not sure the claim is empirically true, and it sounds like something invented for a podcast, but the feeling behind it is real. Choosing on purpose, over time, clears the noise. It quiets the mind, not because the mind becomes empty, but because the mind stops fighting itself. You stop running seventeen background processes about whether you should have done the other thing. You just chose. You are in the version of the life that choice created. You deal with it. It is quieter in there than I expected, and the quiet is not numb, the quiet is the absence of self-argument, which is, it turns out, most of what noise is.

Getting to that quiet requires tolerating the noise first. It requires sitting in the gap, over and over, until the gap stops feeling like a crisis and starts feeling like a room you know. I am not good at this. I am getting better. I am probably going to be getting better at it for the rest of my life, which is fine, that is how this is supposed to work, I just wanted to be further along than I am by now, and the wanting is itself one of the things I am learning to sit in without obeying.

How does a person actually get free. How do you choose when your whole nervous system is optimized for the automatic response. How do you find the gap when you have spent years building over it.

I do not fully know. I am still working on it. What I can say is that it starts with noticing. Just noticing. Not fixing, not optimizing, not engineering a solution, not writing an essay about it, though I am, apparently, doing that too. Just catching yourself in the moment before the automatic yes, and going, oh. There is the gap. There it is.

And then, one day, you do not obey the impulse. And a new version of you starts. Not dramatically. Not in a way anybody will notice except, maybe, the person who has been waiting, quietly, for you to choose differently, and who will feel the difference before you have named it.

Choices do not make you right or wrong. They make you real. They make you a specific person instead of a general one. They turn you from an idea of someone into an actual someone, which is terrifying, because actual someones can be judged, and general ideas cannot. Actual someones are also, though, the only ones who get to be alive. So.

I do not know. Choose, I guess. See what happens. The version of you on the other side of the choice is already waiting. He only needs you to pick the hallway.

— Dallen