One for the Road: Decisions, decisions

The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, who as you’ll soon see wasn’t exactly known for being a barrel of laughs, believed that decision-making was the most important thing in life.

Not love, family, friendship, chasing moments of great happiness or seeking life-affirming fulfilment.

No. Decision-making.

In a cold and meaningless world, JPS reckoned that the path to freedom could only be found by those willing to make choices and take full responsibility for their actions.

Esteemed philosopher and hero to many a lost man though he was, I’m glad he wasn’t my aul boy.

“You were in some shape when you got in from the café last night.”

“Aye, I had a few too many. Go easy on me though, my head’s busting.”

“Go easy on you? In case you didn’t notice son, we’re living in a godless, meaningless, pointless universe, where the only thing that counts for anything at all is the decisions we make. And how do you exercise the only means you have of giving life some value? By going out with the lads, spending all your money in the pub, then landing home at five in the morning absolutely pished outta yer mind.”

“I’m away to stay at my girlfriend’s.”

“Now there’s a good decision.”

Anyway, although my optimistic nature probably precludes me from really relating to Sartre’s nihilistic worldview, there is something in his obsession with choice that does sort of strike a chord with me.

I mean, what is life if not a series of decisions, interrupted by short bouts of unconsciousness and concluded by a very long one?

We’ve all made countless choices in life, some big, some small, some good, some bad, some informed, some blind, some made after months of contemplation, others instictively in the spur of the moment.

For the most part, it’s hard to tell how big the stakes or how far-reaching the consequences of any particular choice will be, when you’re making it.

Who knows how the ripples triggered by the flap of a butterfly’s wings will affect the future, etc etc.

It’s only long after the fact that we can say, ‘That was a really good decision because it made X, Y and Z happen’.

And even at that, our lives are so complicated, with one thing often being contingent on another without us even realising, that it’s hard to say for sure that any outcome was the result of any single decision.

But let’s not fry our heads altogether with confusing chat about the nature of causality.

Suffice to say, sometimes you can more-or-less say for certain that some stuff simply made your life better.

One unambiguously good decision that stands out for me was when, in my early 20s, I took the life-changing step to stop using.

No, not drugs – at least not in the normal sense.

Social media.

For ten years, I had been a passport holder in a string of virtual societies.

Initially, they all looked like Eden. Places we could chat to friends, meet new people, all of that craic – or so we thought.

But inevitably they all degenerated into Gomorrah. Burning kingdoms where no soul could remain clean for long.

The vanity, the voyeurism, the fraudulence, the comparison, the corrupt currencies of sycophancy and scorn.

The endless stream of irresistible empty rubbish.

The brain rot.

What was lost far outweighed anything gained.

I can’t recall the day I went cold turkey, but I know that shortly after getting clean I started reading more, my attention span started to improve and I no longer felt the pressure of constant self-presentation.

I had unburdened myself.

I was free.

But when I started working in journalism, I had to make a comeback on Facebook – like a punch-drunk fighter coming out of retirement because he needs the money.

And recently, also for work reasons, I’ve had to download LinkedIn, BlueSky and X.

Granted, these might not be as poisonous as, say, Instagram or TikTok. But, like I said, they all look like paradise at the start.

The reality is that you don’t know how bad the portaloo smells until you get in there. Nor do you know how slippery the slope is until your hurtling down it headfirst.

The decision to download these apps and create profiles was mine.

But I only did it for work – because I have to. Or I feel I have to. Or I feel I have a responsibility to myself to do it. But nobody made me. I made myself, for myself, in spite of myself.

Tell me, whose decision was that?