One common experience many of us have is the feeling of overwhelm or dread when we have to make a “non-trivial” choice. It can be that we are choosing a career, considering moving somewhere or deciding whether we are ready to move in with someone. It can feel like we should have a playbook on how we should live our lives, like a final plan to execute.

There’s another problem layered in, though. These choices are often hard to weigh against each other, with no clear criterion to fit. A lawyer isn’t inherently better than a software consultant. They’re just different. And while the circumstances are reversible (you can leave one for the other, or go back), you can’t un-live the person each path makes of you. That’s the part you can’t take back. Most critical, perhaps: whether the choice was “right” is a verdict only that future self can deliver, and right now, they’re a stranger.

So how could we approach these decisions? Maybe we can’t, not rationally. We tend to assume a rational choice means having good enough reasons in hand before we commit. But here there are none to be had. No option clearly wins, and the only judge who could tell us we chose well is a stranger the choice hasn’t formed yet. If the reasons have to come first, they never arrive. And if there’s nothing to reason with, it’s hard to see what deliberation is even for. Maybe the honest thing is to admit we’re not really choosing, just picking, and let a coin do the same work with less pretense.

Here I’m borrowing from the philosopher Ruth Chang, whose work on hard choices is where I met the distinction between picking and committing. Picking anything is just landing on an option. A coin can do that for you, which is exactly why you can flip it and then ignore what it says. Committing is putting your weight behind one path and making it yours, and that is the one thing no coin can do for you.

In these hard decisions the reasons were never going to come first. They are downstream of the commitment, not upstream of it. So you commit first, and in committing you become the author of the reasons that make the choice yours.

But this does not mean that any commitment is equally good. A choice can close possibilities; in fact, that is partly what gives it meaning. A life in which no door is ever closed is not a life of unlimited freedom. It is a life that never becomes anything definite.

The more important question may be what the commitment leaves intact. A good hard choice can cost you options. What it should not cost you is the ability to choose again. It should narrow the field without removing you as the author of what comes next.

This also gives deliberation a different purpose. If there is no best option waiting to be calculated, deliberation does not have to produce a verdict. It can help us come into better contact with the possibilities: to try things, notice what draws us in and learn what each path asks us to become.

Herbert Simon observed that a search guided only by broad heuristics such as novelty or interestingness can still be entirely workable. We do not need a complete theory of what matters before we begin exploring. Sometimes interest is enough to tell us where to look next. It does not tell us where we must end up, but it can generate the experiences from which commitment becomes possible.

Even flipping a coin can play a part—not because the coin should choose for us, but because it stages the choice clearly enough for us to react. When it lands, we may notice relief, disappointment or an immediate desire to overrule it. That response is not some infallible voice of the true self. It may contain fear, habit and other people’s expectations alongside desire. But it is still information. The coin has not made the decision; it has given us something more concrete to reason with.

Perhaps the aim is therefore neither to preserve every possibility nor to identify the one future that will prove us right. It is to make commitments that form a life while preserving our capacity to keep participating in its formation.

Instead of asking which choice my future self will judge to have been right, perhaps I should ask: which choice am I willing to take responsibility for making meaningful?