The other day I was shown a piece of land in an area that I've always liked.  It was sold for about 2700万円, which is USD356,427 according to google.


I have about five days to decide whether or not to buy it.  


From my experience, decisions like this, spending huge amounts of money for something you're not sure about, is a recipe for misery, procrastination and "thought cycling".  Any activity done to avoid the decision process, for example, talking about it, thinking about it calmly in a coffee shop, is quite welcome, but the decision is never actually made.  


It sounds so easy on paper, but a decision has a huge potential for regret.  It's so easy to freeze up and balk. 


Which is why I now understand why CEO's are paid so much.  They're paid to make big decisions and live with the consequences.  This is emotionally disturbing because of how accountable you are.  You ever felt what it's like to be blamed in public?  This is why people love criticizing and whining about things behind their computer monitor on the internet.  There's no accountability.  They're always right, even without any kind of formal expertise.  But if you put them in the limelight, they start becoming all mellow, their balls shrink, and they lose all the acidity in their arguments, because they suddenly have this knee-jerk reaction to please everyone.


Decision-making should not be taken lightly.  To be told, for example, as a programmer, that you have to do X, and that the road to achieve X is Y, and you just a little bit of lateral freedom to do Y... this is fucking child's play.  You do NOT have any right to complain about the decisions up top, because it's very very possible that if you were put on top, you would freeze at every decision because it's a lot harder than it looks.


BIG Decisions are HARD.  So HARD, that it's shocking at how HARD they are when you are first faced with them.  


Big decisions involve great loss of money, or people's lives and happiness are at stake, huge risks and such.  Deciding what furniture for your room, or names of projects, or who should do what in a silly little club, are not big decisions.  If you fuck up it doesn't really matter all that much.