Make The Choice You'll Regret The Least
I have a bad habit of always going for the safest option. Well, had, but it's not something I've completely pruned out of my muscle memory. If given a set of choices and one of them is the least likely to majorly affect my life whether for good or for bad, I'll probably go for that one, even if in the long term it ends up fucking me over. For example - I've let many friendships wither and die because I hesitated on trying to start a conversation, under the assumption of "what if I just come off like a weirdo?" Sure, they didn't think that I was weird (which was incredibly unlikely as is) but they didn't think about me at all. Enough time would pass, and even when I did decide to reach out again it was not the same dynamic anymore.
The analogy of the boiling frog comes to mind - leaving the pot is new, weird, and scary, but if the frog never leaves the pot it'll boil to death, so I figured I'd have to leave the pot somehow. But how? And when? How do I start a conversation? How do you learn Basic Social Skills this late into the game? A child asking that could be looked on as cute, but I finished uni, it's far enough in1 that I'll be looked at funny for asking, right? How do I know when it's just my overactive social anxiety telling me that I'll look weird, and when I'll actually be acting weird? Is my standard of what "weird" is different to others? How do I find out?
Simple - I don't. I don't try to figure out if whatever I'm doing is "weird" or not, because whether or not an act is weird is extremely dependent on context, relationship, and how highly you're viewed by the other person. So how do I decide what to do?
I just make the choice I'll regret the least.
The issue with my "safety" choice mechanism of before was that it exclusively checked the negative possible results of a situation and ignored any positives. Sure, if I send an old friend "hey wanna meet up" out of the blue he might think I'm weird and reject the offer, but it's also possible that he'll be super into it and we'll pick up where we left off, which is incredibly valuable, and it was something I was completely neglecting. Sure it's obvious when I write it down like this, but for Socially Awkward Me it was (and still is) something I have to batter into my brain. Once I've decided I had to leave the boiling pot, I realized that if I wanna keep moving forward I'll be taking gambles on my social status, and if I wanna do that without dying on the inside every time I tell someone "hey", all I have to do is manage these risks the best.
Regretting something is a combination of how much the action you did take gave you, and how much all of the rest could have instead, so even if it's an odd metric it's worked for me well so far. I've started using it on pretty much everything in life - whether or not to talk to someone, what kind of opening line to use, whether to pursue a hobby, what food to order at a restaurant - and my life's been more colorful for it. My life is still pretty average, all things considered, but as long as I'm making progress in any way I'm proud of myself.
I'd like to offer the same idea to you. If there's something you've been wanting to do for a while but kept hesitating on it, think about it like this - would you, in 5 years, regret not doing it more than you would regret doing it? If so, give it a shot. Even if it ends up being a bad experience, at least you know for that for sure and won't be left with lingering thoughts of "what if I had done differently?"
I know everyone above 30 is looking at the page thinking "oh you poor child," but these are the kind of thoughts that run through my head when I'm on an anxious streak so they're the thoughts I need to address here.↩