How to Make Up Your Mind

When I’m having trouble making sense of things, I re-read William James’ (1842-1910) essay The Will to Believe. James was a U.S. psychologist and philosopher who wrote and spoke on topics from psychedelics to suicide to the scientific method. The Will to Believe is about religion, directed by James, a Christian, at an increasingly secular and agnostic Ivy League culture. To be clear, I’m not promoting or criticizing Christianity here; I’m sharing thoughts on James’ work because it offers me comfort in making tough decisions.

First, James tells the reader that options are either live or dead. Live options are options that we can make, that are in the realm of possibility. Dead ones are not. Religion shapes our minds, habits, and worldviews; a lapsed Christian may see returning to Christianity as a live option; sudden conversion to a religion they have never encountered is a dead option. I cannot choose roads I am not aware of, and once I choose one road, I logically choose “not another one.”

Second, options are either forced or avoidable. A forced option means you must choose; not choosing is the same as choosing the negative. To be an agnostic, uncertain of religious truths one way or another, results in the same kind of life in practical terms as rejecting religion. Thinking about religion a lot as a possibility, as I do, is not the same as being religious. Billboards along the road tell me that when I die, I will meet God. Whether true or not, the sentiment is Jamesian—I ultimately have until I die to decide one way or another, and not deciding is the same as “no.”

The third part of James’ process is the difference between a momentous or trivial option. To live one’s life according to a religious worldview, or not, is of course a momentous option—we cannot rewind the track of life and make different options if the ones we made don’t pan out (however much we may sometimes want to!). To decide whether to order salad or soup with lunch may be momentous because it will never be lunch time today again, but how likely is it that your whole life will be profoundly different from this moment on if you choose one or the other? I think, and suspect James would agree, that just how momentous a decision is just can’t be known right away.

Getting the COVID vaccine in the U.S. right now is a live, forced, and momentous option. So long as one is alive, unvaccinated, and has access to the vaccine, one can choose to get it (live option). However, I, as someone who was fully vaccinated as of almost two months ago, cannot choose to not get the vaccine anymore—that option is dead. I have talked to folks who are still hesitant, or who are committed to not getting vaccinated. Such conversations can bear only limited fruit because the option for them remains a live one, but for me the option is dead. I opted to get vaccinated based on the information available to me. I can explain my choice, but I can’t un-make it, and if I’m talking to someone for whom getting the vaccine is a dead option, I’m wasting my time.

Getting vaccinated is also a forced option, logically speaking. Being hesitant here and now has the same practical result as not getting the shot. If I were vaccine hesitant, I could wait until I learn more, or until enough others “go first,” but will never know everything, and cannot predict the future with certainty. I must choose, and every day I do not choose, I am choosing the negative. Unlike James’ religious conversion, in which the biggest part of the story takes place after I am dead, these events unfold around me every day, and their consequences do not begin or end with me or my option.

Getting vaccinated also seems momentous, not trivial. Though most people who get COVID fully recover, many do not. Long-term side effects are well-documented, and it is also possible that the disease will have even more side effects in the longer term. To not get vaccinated might mean contracting COVID, being re-infected by a mutated strain in the future, risking unknown hazards posed by the disease in the long-term, and a greater possibility of spreading the disease to others, some of whom might experience more serious side effects. To get vaccinated means taking the risk, however low, of experiencing serious adverse effects from the vaccine in the short-term, as well as the possibility, however low, of long-term effects not yet known. We cannot have perfect information but must weigh which course seems less hazardous; and must then live with the practical consequences of that decision.

James’ point is a practical one (he is, after all, a co-founder of pragmatism): real life often forces us to make decisions based on incomplete information in a limited time frame. It is the decisions that are live, forced, and momentous that are the most urgent, and often agonizing. Reading James has long helped me when I’m troubled, in making clear what kinds of options I was confronting, the stakes involved, and what I could do to make up my mind.

Source: James, William. 1897. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.

Image Credit: William James Reading, public domain, Wikimedia commons

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