Laurie Ann Paul on How to Approach Transformative Decisions

In one of my favorite passages from his 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the late Czech writer Milan Kundera writes:

Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can only make one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

This captures why big decisions — what to do, where to live, who to love — cause us such agitation: they fix our lives down a particular path from which we can never return.

Which path should we take? How can we best approach the major crossroads of our lives?

Part of the difficulty arising from big life decisions is they typically involve what contemporary philosopher Laurie Ann Paul calls transformative experiences.

Paul defines transformative experiences as having two key characteristics: firstly, you cannot know what they are like until you undergo them, and secondly, they alter you in profound ways.

They are thus both ‘epistemically’ and ‘personally’ transformative: you gain formerly inaccessible knowledge into what it’s actually like to undergo a certain experience, and — crucially — you are also radically changed by it: it reconfigures the way you think, the way you look at the world.

Examples might include becoming a parent for the first time, losing a loved one, undergoing major surgery, becoming famous overnight, winning an Olympic gold, losing a limb, going through a divorce, having a religious conversion, or gaining vision as a blind person.

While we may be able to partially imagine what such events are like, Paul thinks we cannot really know about them until we experience them for ourselves. As she puts it in her 2014 book Transformative Experience,

The epistemic inaccessibility of what it is like to lose a child, or to lose a spouse, or a parent, may be part of what underlies the resentment of the bereaved to comments (from those who have not experienced such a loss) along the lines of ‘I understand what you are going through.’

Kierkegaard makes a similar observation in Fear and Trembling:

Whatever one generation learns from another, it can never learn from a predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh.

So, as Paul neatly summarizes, a transformative experience

teaches you something new, something that you could not have known before having the experience, while also changing you as a person.

How can we make choices about transformative experiences?

Paul thinks part of the reason life-altering choices are so challenging is because, in the face of transformative experiences, our standard approach to making decisions breaks down.

Say I’m at a cafe choosing what to eat for breakfast. Looking at the menu, full of familiar dishes, I can quite easily imagine my future self enjoying — or not — each option. Based on my existing preferences, I can thus assign each option a subjective value. The rational choice is clear: if I’m seeking to maximize value for my future self, I’ll go for the breakfast I imagine myself most enjoying.

If we try to apply this approach to decisions involving transformative experiences, however, we run into two problems:

1. We cannot accurately assign subjective value to transformative kinds of experience that we haven’t undergone ourselves.
2. Once we make the choice to undergo a transformative experience, we will change in unpredictable ways, so our current preferences are not a guide to what our future preferences might become.

Consider the example of deciding whether or not to become a parent. Before you have a child, Paul states, you simply cannot know what it’ll be like, from your inner subjective perspective, to have one.

You might have looked after other people’s children, you might have looked after a younger sibling, you might hear testimony from other parents, but you cannot accurately simulate the myriad ways in which your child will impact your inner life. As Paul puts it:

[T]he particular properties of your future child, her dispositions and inclinations, her health and physical abilities, and her cognitive and emotional makeup will have a huge effect on your life as a parent. The character of many hours of your waking life will be composed of experiences that are the direct effects of the features of the actual child that you produce.

But having a child isn’t just epistemically transformative — it doesn’t just grant you a new kind of knowledge — it’s also personally transformative: it changes who you are. Fathers experience hormonal shifts after contact with their new baby, but mothers in particular undergo profound biological, neurophysical, and hormonal changes during and after childbirth.

Prospective parents simply cannot anticipate the impact these changes will have, especially on their priorities and preferences, Paul writes:

It might be wonderful, or joyous, or happy—or it might not. But however it is, it is usually very intense, and people who have a child… find themselves with very different perspectives and preferences after the child is born. [F]or most people… [y]our preferences will change. The way you live your life will change. What and who you care about will change.

And the trouble is, because it is also epistemically transformative to have a child, you don’t know how many of your core preferences will evolve. Once you have a child, will you care less about your career or your education? Will your professional work still define your identity? Will you value your child’s welfare over your own? Will you love your cat just as much? Will you love your partner more? Will you love your partner less?

Who knows? It depends on what it’s like for you to have your child.

The point, then, is making a rational decision on this basis is impossible. We cannot know what it’s like to have a child until we have one, and so we cannot assign ‘having a child’ a subjective value.

And, even if we were able to assign ‘having a child’ a subjective value, we cannot know how our preferences will change after having a child.

So, no matter the rigor of our cost-benefit analyses, the depth and diversity of gathered testimony, the obsessiveness of our research and future modeling, the ‘right’ or ‘correct’ or ‘rational’ decision will remain elusive.

When it comes to a transformative decision, we simply cannot know what the future will hold — and how it might change us.

How, then, should we proceed? What can inform our transformative decisions?

Given we cannot assign subjective value to an unknowable future experience, and given we cannot anticipate how that future experience will change us, Paul thinks we need to approach transformative decisions without predefined expectations.

If we want to proceed rationally, Paul suggests we shouldn’t try to weigh unknowable future values. Instead, we should take a step back and weigh revelatory values: consider the value of discovering or not discovering the experience itself. She writes:

you decide whether you want to discover how your life will unfold given the new type of experience.

Unknowable future values cannot play a part in rational decision making, but revelatory values can.

So, rather than ask ourselves questions like, ‘which path will make me happier?’ or ‘which path is better?’, Paul thinks we should ask things like ‘Do I deem the revelatory value of the path itself worth it? Do I want to gain insight into what this path is like? Do I want to discover who I’ll become down this path? Or does the revelation carry no appeal? Am I satisfied with my current preferences, and uninterested in seeing how this new, undiscovered kind of experience will change them?’

Approaching transformative decisions isn’t easy, but ruling out the possibility of a ‘better’ or ‘correct’ answer can be liberating. You cannot model how you’ll feel or even who you’ll be, so don’t base the decision on that.

Instead, base it on whether discovering the experience itself is worth more to you than not discovering it — regardless of how it might change you. As Paul puts it:

If you choose to undergo a transformative experience and its outcomes, you choose the experience for the sake of discovery itself, even if this entails a future that involves stress, suffering, or pain.

Applying this to the example of deciding whether to have a child, Paul recommends basing the choice not on imagining what it’s like to have a child, nor on how having a child will make you feel, because those are not reliable guides; rather, base it on whether you want to discover what it’s like to both be a parent, and how being a parent will change you. She writes:

You decide to have the experiences of life as a parent, with all its up and downs, its happiness and sadness, and its changes in what you care about… you don’t choose it because you know what it will be like—you choose it in order to discover who you’ll become.

And, correspondingly, if you choose to remain childfree, you are choosing to forego this revelation. You decide not based on thinking, ‘I know it won’t make me happy’ (because you can’t know that), but because discovering what it’s like to be a parent is less interesting to you than other potential paths.

You can gather all the testimony, do all the research, but in the end it has to come down to this: which revelations do you think are worth having? What domains of human experience do you want to discover?

Life is punctuated by a series of revelations that profoundly change who we are

So, should you start a family? Should you move to another country? Should you reset your career? For Paul, unfortunately with all these kinds of transformative decisions we simply have very little to go on.

As we saw Kundera note at the beginning of this article, part of the existential condition of human life is that we cannot go back to try out different decisions; we can only commit to one.

And calculation is futile: we don’t know the values of what we’re calculating, and even if we did, the result now will not be relevant to our changed, future selves. All else being equal, there is no necessarily better option. There are simply different options, which we’ll adapt to as we live them.

While this might be frustrating, it should also partly free us from the impulse to obsessively plan our futures. We cannot know what’s best.

So, moving to a new country, changing career — I approach such transformative decisions not with set expectations, not because ‘I’ll be glad I did it’, but to discover who I’ll become.

I weigh the value of discovery vs. non-discovery, whether I deem the revelation worth it, whether the discovery and unpredictable change stemming from it intrigues, or not. I choose the path not that I know is ‘better’ for me (because such knowledge is impossible), but the path I’m most interested in experiencing, in my one and only existence.

As Paul puts it:

The lesson of transformative experience, then, is that if you want to choose rationally, you are forced to face your future like Marlow, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as he sails along the coast of Africa. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’”

When faced with each of life’s transformative choices, you must ask yourself: do I plunge into the unknown jungle of a new self? Or do I stay on the ship?

While we may occasionally dress them up as well-researched and considered decisions, then, the major crossroads of our lives are in some sense leaps of faith. We are responsible for such decisions, but perhaps we’d do well to recognize just how little control we have over how they turn out.

We should not blame ourselves — or other people, for that matter — if paths taken don’t meet our hopes or expectations. Chalk it up as valuable experience, for when it comes to transformative decisions, “You knew what you were getting yourself into” is simply never true.

Life is a game less about prediction and more about revelation, Paul suggests. Maybe we should adjust how we play accordingly:

A life lived rationally and authentically, then, as each big decision is encountered, involves deciding whether or how to make a discovery about who you will become. If revelation comes from experience, independently of the (first-order) pleasure or pain of the experience, there can be value in discovering how one’s preferences and lived experience develop, simply for what such experience teaches. One of the most important games of life, then, is the game of Revelation, a game played for the sake of play itself.

What do you make of Paul’s arguments?

• What transformative experiences have you had in life? Were there things previously important to you that have become less important since the experience?
• Do you agree with Paul that transformative choices elude our standard procedure for making rational decisions? That, in some sense, our major life choices involve a leap of faith?
• Do you think the value of revelation and discovery is a good guide to making difficult choices? That, all else being equal, we should choose the path we are most interested in discovering?
• Do you wonder how life might have gone differently had you made different choices?
• Paul focuses on major transformative decisions, but to what extent does every decision change who we are?

To inform your answers to such questions, consider exploring Paul’s book, Transformative Experience. You might also enjoy the following related articles:

• Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards
• Existence Precedes Essence: What Sartre Really Meant
• Nietzsche On What ‘Finding Yourself’ Actually Means
• Heidegger On Being Authentic in an Inauthentic World
• Hunter S. Thompson: Don’t Look for Goals, Look for a Way of Life

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