I’ll let you in on a little secret about me: I was waitlisted at Duke. There’s an unwritten column somewhere within me that describes how I initially put up roadblocks in my own way to support a self-fulfilling expectation that I wasn’t good enough, but that’s not what this column is about. I used to be really good at that. But this is a column about making the decisions that drive our lives and the way we think about these decisions.
I’m a neuroscience major with academic interests in behavioral economics as well. While I’ve spent the last four years studying decision-making, I’m notoriously bad at making decisions. Whether I’m caught distracted in front of an open fridge, requesting to order last at restaurants or frozen between two too-similar—or too-dissimilar—options when making a more major choice, the pressure to pick right and minimize risk, maximize utility and be held accountable to an unknown outcome generally terrifies me. So as a senior in high school, when I found my guidance counselor waiting for me outside my AP Literature exam to share the news that I’d been accepted to Duke, my reaction was mostly panic that my decision-making wasn’t done.
My original decision to attend a small liberal arts college in the Northeast had been a carefully calculated result of numerically weighted pros and cons, deference to the advice of nearly everyone I knew and profound inability to mentally project to the future. After a full month I bought into the idea of attending a school that promised to be Not Your Typical College Experience. Then Duke, a school I hadn’t previously bothered visiting, sold me on the exact opposite in a matter of days.
Four years in—I rounded up—it’s really difficult to imagine what college might have been like had I gone elsewhere. Had I not gotten off the waitlist. Entire parallel universes play out—me, on a different campus, with a different set of friends I never met, taking different classes, possibly with different academic interests and goals. With different values, shaped by different universities. With different memories. Me, different.
A set of entirely different worlds, albeit worlds full of unknowns. Worlds, ambiguous and gray, that pale against the vibrancy of my past four years of experience but exist hypothetically in my mind nonetheless. Worlds that never existed because of a decision I made, where my life would have been woven into a different set of plot points, my victories and frustrations occurring against a different backdrop, supported by a different cast of characters.
This may not resonate with some people, like those who applied early decision or perhaps those who tend to have a plan and never stray from it.
But if it does resonate, take a quick tally of the number of people you’ve interacted with today, this week or this year on this campus. A simple decision to come here made each of us a fiber in so many different interwoven stories with potential impact on so many peoples’ universes with every action we take. We are so powerful.
We each know so many people here. We could have chosen to live a parallel life without them in it and without us in it for them, and we didn’t.
That’s some Matrix sh** right there.
But if we zoom in to the perspective we take in my neuroscience classes, decision-making looks really, really different.
Brain cells talk to each other with chemical and electrical signals called action potentials, which must build up to a requisite electrical voltage in order to fire. There’s a whole host of other players in the game—like neurotransmitters, receptor, and cellular specializations—but everything in the brain boils down to connections that at their core are binary. Go, no-go. All of human experience—your movements, your emotions, your memories, your thoughts, the shapes that make up the words on the page or the screen that mean something subjective to you, the biggest decisions you’ve ever made—can be transduced into yes-or-no interactions between neurons in the brain.
Whether you’re rolling your eyes at me right now for being overdramatic or mind-blown, it’s the result of a summation of tons of neurons doing their thing.
If you’re still with me, we just went from feeling incredibly powerful at the potential impact our actions had on the universe to feeling teeny-tiny-powerless in an entire universe dictated by microscopic action potentials.
So where am I going with this?
With just over two months left of college, I feel a profound and mounting pressure to have done college “right”—whatever that means. I want to be sure that I’m leaving a legacy I’m proud of, or at the very least if I’m leaving, that I’m satisfied. A big part of that is a newfound urgency to live with meaning and without regrets, with only the most strategic decisions and without wiggle room for mistakes.
But in four years of studying decisions at Duke and almost twenty-two of struggling to make them myself, I’m pretty convinced that making the right decisions is far less important than consciousness of the impact we’ve had by making them.
Think of how many people have stood on East Campus to take that iconic all-class birds-eye photo in the shape their graduation year. From inside our own brains as that photo is taken, we’re insignificant, a number, just passing through. But zoom out and we’ve played a role in a bigger picture, etching ourselves into a place that has permanence in so many peoples’ eyes.
I almost didn’t go here. I probably would’ve loved college regardless of where I went. And this university may not remember me, or most of us, decades from now, but we’ll still be here. Our legacy, left in so many people’s collective memory, is all because of a single decision we have in common. I may be bad at decisions but I’m pretty satisfied with that.
Elissa Levine is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Thursday.
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