Making Choices

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// 2025-07-04

This post was inspired by What if This is it? by Prickly Oxheart.

Today, for perhaps the first time ever, I've understood what is meant by the “joy of missing out”. As an extrovert, the thought of missing a party or something fills me with a great sorrow. But the joy isn't about just sitting quietly at home thinking about what everyone else is up to at that party. The joy is about making—and owning—choices in the first place. It's why the example of a party doesn't work for me, because my choice would be simply to go to the party.

Here's a better example: I don't have any tattoos. Part of my reasoning is that I only have so much space on my body that can serve as a canvas, and if I got a tattoo in one place, I wouldn't be able to use that part of my body for another tattoo ever again unless I spent time and money on expensive tattoo removal services. So instead of doing something that I worried I'd end up regretting, I simply didn't get any tattoos at all. You can't regret the mistakes you don't make, right?

Wrong. That's denying myself a life experience because I'm choosing fear over courage. Fear is inaction; courage is action despite being scared. In this situation, what's making me scared? Well, I'm scared of making the wrong decision and having to live with it.

But life is about choosing courage. It's about committing to a choice, whether it's right or wrong, and in spite of the fact that other avenues will be closed off from us as a result. Of course they will! But would you prefer to choose one life path out of countless millions, or none at all?

Let's call choosing not to act a “negative choice” as opposed to a “positive choice”, which would be actively making the effort to choose something. Making a negative choice is still a choice: it's choosing inaction over action. It's sitting in the crotch of a fig tree, starving to death, just because you can't make up your mind which of the figs to choose. It's Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place being crushed by a falling AC unit while he's agonising over which bar to go to. And in my case, it's spending five years overthinking and second-guessing myself rather than getting on hormone replacement therapy as soon as I realised I was trans, all while my body slowly continued its inexorable march towards masculinisation.

Let's return to the idea of the “joy of missing out”. I used to think that it was about making a negative choice and, as a result, sitting around at home alone. But now, I believe it is better defined as the joy from making a positive choice (like going to the theatre), which simply happens to render it impossible to make a conflicting positive choice (like going to a party on the same night).

But what if the positive choice we make is the wrong choice? Well, yeah, so what? ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all! We will make mistakes in this life, and we will do things that we end up regretting—but we can do what we can to rectify those mistakes, and if we can't, then nine times out of ten, it's still better to have made those mistakes, and failed in doing the right thing, than to have sat idly by, and succeeded in doing the wrong thing.

Don't get me wrong: your choices matter, but not as much as the act of making a choice in the first place. So go outside. Engage with the world. Be brave. Live.