The Art of Decision-Making

A New Yorker essay exploring how people make (or fail to make) life's biggest choices. Rothman opens with Charles Darwin's famously mediocre pro-and-con list about marriage and uses it to frame a broader question: why are our big decisions often less calculated than our small ones?

The piece surveys three approaches. Decision science, represented by Steven Johnson's book Farsighted, offers structured processes — scenario planning, design charettes, full-spectrum analysis — to navigate bounded rationality and conflicting objectives. Johnson applied these to his own family's cross-country move, producing a PowerPoint deck and a contractual escape clause.

Decision theory, the philosophical tradition, treats decisions as value-maximizing equations: identify your values, assign weights, and the right choice pops out. But this breaks down for what the philosopher Edna Ullmann-Margalit called "opting" — choices that reconfigure your values rather than maximize existing ones. Choosing to become a parent, emigrate, or switch careers changes who you are, making the pre-choice self an unreliable judge.

L. A. Paul sharpens this into the problem of transformative experience: you can't know what parenthood is like before experiencing it, so there's no strictly rational way to decide. Agnes Callard offers a counter in aspiration — the gradual process of trying on new values through "bad" placeholder reasons until you can grasp the real ones. Aspiration, she argues, is how we author our own transformations rather than drifting into them.

Rothman weaves his own experience of becoming a father through the essay, concluding that life in the "meanwhile" resists being reduced to stepping stones — the meaningful instants follow one another without needing to be chapters in a decision narrative.