It’s December 2020, and the candidate you voted for has turned out to be the undisputed worst President in history. You think back to your decision made on that fateful Tuesday in November 2016, and you say, “What was I thinking? I made a terrible choice.”

You may be unhappy with your President, but you didn’t make a bad choice (I hope. Keep reading). Because it wasn’t your choice that was terrible. The issue is that you’re confusing the decision process with the outcome of your decision.

Let me explain.

This discussion hinges on how we think about the choices we make, both before and after we make them. It is the process of deciding that matters, not the decision itself. Put another way, it is not what we decide, it is how we decide.

Proper decision making means that we investigate appropriately, weigh our options, and make a decision based on the information that we have. If we don’t investigate, don’t consider our options well, or don’t make a choice, we have quite possibly decided badly.

But if we have investigated well, have weighed our options, and then make our decision, we have executed our decision well (this is the how). Whether or not our decision (the what) turns out to be what we had hoped is out of our control, and has no bearing on the quality of our decision.

Here’s an example. You’re thinking about buying a lottery ticket, and are considering your options. You may think about your odds of winning, what numbers you’d like to pick, or what game you’d like to play. You may consider the possible repercussions for purchasing the ticket, win or lose. You think about the potential risk involved in such a purchase (for example, if you are addicted to gambling, the consequences may be severe). You make your decision. Now, assuming that you’ve given the above process proper consideration, your job is done. What happens next has absolutely no bearing on whether or not you made the “right” decision.

Let’s say you were going to buy a ticket with the numbers corresponding to your daughter’s birthday. Ultimately, you decided that the responsible thing would be to not buy the lottery ticket. You check the news the next day, and the winning numbers were exactly those you would have chosen.

An appropriate time, if ever, for “Oy Vey!”

This would be pretty upsetting, of course. But what I’m saying is that this does not mean that you’ve made the wrong decision. The decision you made was based on the facts you had at the moment of your decision. At that time, you decided that the downside of buying the ticket outweighed the potential benefit. You decided that it wasn’t worth it then, and that has not changed.

People are fond of saying, “If I knew then what I knew now, I would have acted differently”. We need to stop saying that. We never know then what we know now. That’s not how decisions work. The best we can do is to use our past decisions to inform our current ones. And then, if we don’t like our results, we can see if it makes sense to change our decision process in the future. There’s no use in beating ourselves up for things we could not have foreseen.

Because the choices we make are up to us, but the results are not at all in our control.

So let’s consider our voting choices well, and leave the election results in the hands of the real Commander-in-Chief.

Shimmy Feintuch, LCSW CASAC-G maintains a private practice in Brooklyn, NY, and Washington Heights, NYC, with specialties in addictions and anxiety. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University. Contact: (530) 334-6882 or shimmyfeintuch@gmail.com. 

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