--- title: The Art of Decision-Making (2019) | daily.dev description: A philosophical exploration of how humans make life's biggest decisions, drawing on Charles Darwin's marriage deliberations, Steven Johnson's book... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-art-of-decision-making-2019--9hpege9co twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Art of Decision-Making (2019) | daily.dev og:description: A philosophical exploration of how humans make life's biggest decisions, drawing on Charles Darwin's marriage deliberations, Steven Johnson's book... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-art-of-decision-making-2019--9hpege9co og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/9hPEGe9cO.png og:image:alt: The Art of Decision-Making (2019) og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Art of Decision-Making (2019) **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 22 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A philosophical exploration of how humans make life's biggest decisions, drawing on Charles Darwin's marriage deliberations, Steven Johnson's book 'Farsighted,' and philosophers like Edna Ullmann-Margalit, L.A. Paul, and Agnes Callard. The piece contrasts formal decision science techniques (scenario planning, design charrettes, prudential algebra) with the reality that transformative life choices—having children, changing careers, emigrating—often resist rational optimization. Callard's concept of 'aspiration' is central: we gradually try on new values before fully possessing them, living between an Old Self and a New Self. The author weaves in his own experience of infertility and eventually becoming a father, illustrating how the biggest choices are less decided than lived into. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 10 discussions and 36 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-31). **TL;DR:** Commenters broadly engage with the article's central tension—whether transformative decisions like parenthood can or should be rationally pre-evaluated—with many sharing personal anecdotes that both support and complicate the piece's philosophical framing. The discussion is thoughtful and mixed rather than uniformly enthusiastic. **Sentiment:** 45% positive · 40% mixed · 15% skeptical **The case for** - Several commenters affirm from personal experience that embracing uncertainty in major life decisions (like parenthood) can lead to unexpected happiness they wouldn't have predicted in advance. - The article's reference to philosophical frameworks (L.A. Paul, Agnes Callard) is seen as genuinely useful for thinking about identity-changing choices. - Commenters note that humans have a remarkable adaptive capacity to find genuine happiness in new circumstances, lending credibility to the 'aspiration' concept. **The pushback** - One commenter argues the article's logic around parenthood risks glossing over real cases of parental regret, noting that two lives can suffer if someone becomes a parent and hates it. - A commenter suggests the article's conclusion effectively amounts to 'there's no reason not to have children,' reading it as the author rationalizing his own personal journey rather than offering universal insight. - The omission of decision paralysis as a key real-world problem in decision-making is flagged as a notable gap. - The article is criticized for not engaging with the meta-question of how much effort is worth spending on any given decision. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters engage substantively with the philosophical and personal dimensions of the piece, offering a mix of personal validation, pushback on the parenthood framing, and suggestions for additional frameworks (Ruth Chang, Richard Pettigrew, Jonathan Haidt). **Hottest debate:** Whether the philosophical argument that you 'can't know' what parenthood is like until you try it is a liberating insight or a dangerously incomplete basis for such a consequential, irreversible decision. **Open questions** - Is there reliable real-time data comparing happiness levels between parents and voluntarily childless people? - How should one weigh the risk of parental regret—which affects both parent and child—against the unknowability of the experience in advance? - Does Callard's concept of 'aspiration' provide actionable guidance, or does it merely describe a phenomenon without helping people decide? **Highlights** > > Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.” These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like. For Paul, there’s something thrilling about this quandary. Why should today’s values determine tomorrow’s? I hate arguments like this, PARTICULARLY when the topic is becoming a parent. Sure, you might become a new person and love being a parent far more than missing the aspects of life you sacrificed to be there. OR you might hate it - I have at least one friend that told me "I love my daughter, but I hate being a parent" in a terribly gut-wrenching way. To say you don't know - that you CAN'T know - what it's like to be a parent without being one doesn't mean you should just shrug and give it a try. Ditto the same rationale for other arguments - there are many things you can't know if you'll like until you try it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to decide if you will in advance. Of course you'll never know if you'll love being a parent, you won't know how it can change you, and EVERY parent has moments of frustrations that are not the same as regretting having a child/children. But if you become one, there's at least two lives that can really really suffer if you hate it, so it's worth dedicating some effort to thinking about in advance. Finding parenthood worthwhile is a very very common state for humanity (for good reason!) and most of us have benefited from that. But we shouldn't assume that it will just work out that way, for ourselves or for others. > — [ergothus on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002093) > I always look at it this way. Both parents and non-parents are trapped on their own side of ignorance. The childless because they haven't tried to the experience of having a child and the love that most feel. The parents because they forget how it was to not have the obligations of a child. My personal opinion on the matter is that children are 49% horrible and 51% of pure bliss and it's that 1% which makes the whole difference. > — [ThomPete on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002658) > > My personal opinion on the matter is that children are 49% horrible and 51% of pure bliss and it's that 1% which makes the whole difference. In my head I think of it similarly: the mean of the experience of living before and after having a child is roughly the same, but the variance is much higher after. Which side of the mean I'm on varies, and I honestly don't know where it will end up over time. That's why it's so hard to know whether I regret it or not. Given all the positive stuff (ya know, the unconditional love and all that), I can never say that I regret it, but in so many ways life is also just objectively so much worse now. > — [purplethinking on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19003289) > I'm surprised to see no mention of decision paralysis. Hanging over every decision is a meta decision of how much effort to spend in making it (and so on, recursively). Given all the unpredictability the author points out, many decisions don't get much more benefit from much more thought. > — [imh on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19004058) > I liked the first part but then simplified the reasoning of the article and the philosophers it cites is: "there is no reason not to have children no matter how your life is now or how yiu want it to be" which makes sense if the author is trying deep inside to cope with his own decision. > — [arisAlexis on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19006985) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18997809) · 160 points · 30 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124525) · 28 points · 4 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24957024) · 4 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377422) · 2 points · 2 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948330) · 2 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18917632) · 2 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18907274) · 2 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18902470) · 2 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18969390) · 1 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18956631) · 1 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Don't ask what you want. 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