I won’t tell a story of mental struggle to those of you who are listening, since few would identify the swirl underneath the sea of tranquility. The struggle was not thrilling, not even that exciting, if any, yet it was a huge decision made in a person’s life and will weigh so much in the sense that the person may not be able to realize at the moment.
It is usually a critical moment when a person decided to roll the dice and to fight for something, i.e. the so-called “following one’s heart” that constitutes the real birth of a tragic figure. Though I’ve no heroic heart or Byronic spirit, my personal experience does overturn the previous impression of something being “critical”. It is the usual and normal decisions that are the most frightening, in the sense that you never know what profound effects it will impose on your future life. Combined with a propensity to play safe, you are preparing for your future self a gift of regret and a feeling of non-fulfillment.
Cost-Benefit Analysis is the lamest approach to make a decision, usually misleading and prone to compromise-making. Facing choices, I mean a lot of them, may not be a manifestation of maximization of freedom, but utmost enslavement. Your rationality will render you ending up in a state of forever making such CBA until comes the moment when some overwhelmingly strong external forces decide for you. Yet later your burden is even heavier. You have to convince yourself of the merits of this choice and somehow prove this is exactly what you want all along. It is hard since you do it the other way round: finding explanations for the answer rather than finding the answer based on question posed. This burden is laid on the feelings, not on the degree of difficulty on the part of the explanations. You feel low. You realized finally that you were not deciding at all, but being bound so tightly. Nothing could be altered and the only thing you need to do and can do is making yourself feel better. This feeling sucks.
Or perhaps there is no such thing as free choice, nor is there satisfaction of human desire. Everything is a compromise. Things are linked in one way or another. Present links the future, institution links the individual. It is only wishful thinking that one could outsmart the institution by simply making CBA and calculations—or there is in fact no way to outsmart it. The fact is thus this simple. Stop struggling.
So where is the way out? Keep calm and carry on, dude. C’est tout.