(from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton)

I put it down.

“You want the small ones. They’re the sweetest.” She told me, in somewhat more detail, that she knew a lot about sweet potatoes.

“So I want the smallest ones, like this,” I said, holding up one that measured about six inches long and two inches wide.

“Yeah, the small ones are the sweetest. These are all too big. You want the smallest ones.”

I thanked her warmly for the tip and walked back to my cart with two small sweet potatoes. As I stepped back over to grab a third, I told her to have a good day, and then resumed my course towards the salmon. A young woman took my place by the sweet potatoes and began to put one in her basket.

“That one’s too big. The small ones are sweeter.”

I’d appreciate any thoughts on where it should go or what posts have been the high points.

Actually, we already have decision insurance.

The cost of processing returns, restocking returned items, and lost profit from returned merchandise has to come from somewhere. Eventually it gets passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. We pay extra for the right to undo our decisions.

What’s worse, though, is that we pay an emotional cost. According to The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, psychology research has shown that people who make reversible choices are generally less happy with their choices after some time passes. At the same time, they are less likely to return an item they chose, because of what’s called the endowment effect: we care more about not losing what we have than we do about gaining what we don’t have, so once we buy something we’d rather keep it most of the time than get back the option of buying something else with the money.

So when your choice is reversible, you are unlikely to reverse it but you will probably be less happy with it.

Having many choices to begin with is also emotionally dangerous, according to Schwartz. It’s because of that same mental quirk: we give more emotional weight to losses than to gains.

When you compare twenty choices instead of three, there are many more pros and cons to consider. Each choice has advantages that you will miss out on if you choose something else—lost opportunities, if you will. We weight those losses more heavily than gains, and the more options we have, the more lost opportunities regardless of what we pick.

Think of it this way: if I give you three choices, whichever one you pick you miss out on the advantages of the other two. If I give you twenty choices, you miss out on the advantages of the nineteen you didn’t pick.

We can’t handle missing all of those hypothetical gains. The decision becomes psychologically impossible, and we put it off or delegate it.

The solution: make irreversible decisions. You will be happy with the decision anyway, because of the endowment effect, and your unchangeable decision will help reduce choice overload further down the road, leaving you free to focus on the few options that matter the most.

A friend once gave me the memorable advice that in life we need to be able to manufacture our own happiness. Too often we get our happiness tangled up in circumstances we can’t control, or in other people’s decisions. What’s worse, sometimes we feel like we need to leech happiness off of other people’s reserves: we deal with feeling down by finding someone to cheer us up. If I can generate happiness entirely on my own resources, I never have to wait for someone or something to refuel me. In fact, I can pour out surplus happiness into the rest of the world.

The same goes for work. A job is not a fundamental human right; it’s a simple reciprocal arrangement. You are paid a certain amount of money (or benefits, or fattened oxen) to generate an equivalent or greater amount of value.

I’ve found that, in the furious complexity of the modern world, it is tragically easy to lose sight of this very simple equation. We can effortlessly get ourselves in situations where we consume more time, money,  value, energy, chocolate, or Tamari roasted almonds than we are generating, and HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA.

If a business consumes more money than it earns, at some point it goes out of business. If a power plant consumes more energy than it generates, it is quickly shut down. (Also, the idiot that designed it gets fired.) If a food takes more calories to eat than it contains, then it is celery. Or cucumber.

Think for a moment. Think carefully. Would you want to be a cucumber?

Today, I’ve been wishing that a particular collection of excruciating jaw pains were more of a concept and less of a sensation. It’s occurred to me, though, that the concept of pain—all our thinking about it—actually makes the pain worse.

Our brains are much stranger, more irrational contraptions than we make them out to be. We are actually awful at explaining why our minds work the way they do, and when we try to explain we tend to make things up out of nowhere.

There are a handful of people who, for one reason or another, are missing the connection between the two hemispheres of their brains. This means that one half of the brain can know things that the other doesn’t. If you tell one of these people to get up and walk around, but only communicate it to one side of the brain (for example, by showing a message that is visible only to one eye), the person will go ahead and get up—but one half of the brain will have no idea why.

Now, if you ask the other side of the brain “Why did you get up?” you would think the person would say “I don’t know.”

Not so. The brain will actually make up an explanation out of nowhere, and respond with something like “I wanted to get some coffee.”

So, in a nutshell, we’re programmed to explain ourselves. Our brains will fabricate explanations rather than admit not knowing why they did something.

In our hyper-explanatory culture, any sensation that enters our consciousness is subjected to a sort of customs interrogation at the border. Thoughts, feelings, sensations must all present ID at the perimeter of our minds or they are barred from entry. A whole lot of diverse sensory impressions get stamped as “pain” and therefore “bad.” This is really very convenient, since it saves our perpetually distracted minds from the effort to perceive (literally, “grasp with the mind”) anything unfamiliar. (While we’re on the etymology kick, it’s worth noting that “explain” comes from the Latin ex- planus, “flatten out.” Think “plain,” like an open field.)

If you actually reach into some of these sensations and rummage around a bit, sometimes you find that they aren’t so bad. Sometimes you find that they ARE so bad, in a specific way that you hadn’t noticed—the earache is actually a neck pain, or the back pain is from your worn-out leg muscles. Either way, you notice things you can’t get just by thinking.

A fellow by the name of Christian Faur, who is well past his daycare years, has built a decent portion of his art career around crayons. His approach is to take hundreds of crayons and stack them up like the dots in old TV screens so they form a sort of mosaic. (If you don’t quite follow my description, or even if you do, click the link above and take a look.)

To me, Faur’s crayons illustrate a cornerstone of practical spirituality: the ability to elevate everyday things—objects, experiences, interactions—into something new and greater, by ignoring the limitations we think into place with our judgment-happy brains. It’s a sort of crayon apotheosis.

Substituting observation for judgment is a habit that requires practice, whether that practice is art, meditation, or scientific innovation.