Decisions x The Future
On Sunday, December 29th, 2024, I took the tall pulpit at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Muncie (UUCM) for the first time. I’m tremendously grateful for the opportunity to speak to this welcoming, intelligent, and passionate congregation. Regular church members and personal visitors filled the sanctuary rather well for a mid-holiday weekend usually affected by flu and celebration fatigue. Thank you so much to everyone who came, listened, and spoke with me after. Decision is my religion—one I wouldn’t dream of foisting on others, but as much as we share its value, I’m glad to continue this discourse in the hopes of bringing about a brighter future for all.
About the sermon
Title
Decisions & Futurism: What to remember while making choices to build a better tomorrow
Summary
Learn the navigational science, contemplative art, and inescapable religion of decision making to manifest a brighter future while you formulate your 2025 New Year’s resolutions. Bring awareness and forgiveness to your decisive blind spots. Discover why we decide better together. Hold and share hope to realize optimistic futures through big and small choices.
Bio
Rachel Yves (sounds like Eve OR Ives; she/her) is a Hoosier by birth and a Mainer by heart. Rachel moved back to Indiana in early 2024 and gratefully found a home among the UU community. She’s an endlessly curious artist who prays at the altar of decision.
The Sermon
*Final speech deviates slightly from manuscript provided below.
Good morning!
My name is Rachel Yves. I’ve decided that it sounds like Eve now. My ex-wife and I used to pronounce it Ives. Yves was our choice, you see. In a marriage between two people who would traditionally take a man’s name, we had the freedom to choose differently. And there really was no blending Abraham and Dumont. I’d narrowed the list of possibilities down to tree-related words because they loved trees. They chose Yves because it’s the name of a composer they grew to enjoy. They also chose it because my initials would spell the word RELY instead of RELF, Faraday was on that list. Faraday means man’s woods in Old Irish. It was a kind gift that they gave me on a beautiful sunset. And it’s my choice to keep, but in our separation, I’ve chosen to reclaim the French pronunciation of Eve moving forward. What’s in a name? In my case, a great deal of choice—which is fitting given my topic today: The intersection of decision and futurism.
While I was married, I was alone with my thoughts a lot—alone with our German Shepherd Cattle Dog rescue, Gove, and a great deal of data. I believe that solitude changed me a great deal. Time and space were ample for reflection. And I reflected for so long and so hard that I saw diamonds in my navel. I mined a new religion out of my mind. I pulled myself to prayer at the altar of every decision. I prayed to alter decision.
Fate has a decidedly funny place in my belief system. Philip Tetlock wrote, in his book Super Forecasting, which outlines how to research and make better forecasts for the future, that “Finding meaning in events is positively correlated with well-being but negatively correlated with foresight.” He continues: “That sets up a depressing possibility: Is misery the price of foresight?” And I must tell you that I was miserable. Perhaps, it was foresight.
In all that reflection, I found myself again through relationships and friendships and renewed faith, a new faith in decision making. My new meditations delivered a question the pursuit of which has pulled me home and then here: What are the physics of decision? If it’s possible to measure the angular momentum and trajectory of a decision, it’s easier to predict where it will lead—or land, and what it might impact. Decision Science, a relatively new interdisciplinary field complete with Harvard PhDs and six-figure salaries, practices what the historian Yuval Noah Harari calls “Dataism”, or the religion of data. In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow he says, “In practice, this means that Dataists are sceptical about human knowledge and wisdom, and prefer to put their trust in Big Data and computer algorithms.”
In my lonely days, I worked at one of the world’s largest credit bureaus and data brokers as a marketer selling consumer data on more than 330 million Americans to corporations and other clients. I worked in Big Data. Everyone I worked with was a “dataist.” Honestly, I was fascinated. Here is all the supposed wisdom that surveillance capitalism can acquire packaged into segmented audiences fit for strategic influence and meaningful connection. It could be used to determine and forecast almost anything. Here was all this data to inform almost any decision you could hope to make.
Suddenly, I was gazing at decision like I’d never seen it before. What was this thing that seemed to be the most important, most valuable thing in business? The most valuable thing to democracy? The most valuable thing to my personal life? It was like the feeling you get when you say a word so many times it loses all meaning. That’s called semantic satiation by the way. I was probing the word “decision” like a linguist encountering it for the first time.
Sapir-Whorf, a linguistic hypothesis that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience, may be disproven, but English makes my perception of decision a very physical thing. But Ancient Greeks had a word, Kairos, to describe the perfect moment to make a decision. In English, when we come to a decision, we come to a fork in the road. Our path, the choices we need to make next, are clear or unclear to us. English speakers seem to describe decision as a linear thing, orbit, or current on which we move forward through space and time. I like Kairos.
When I envision Kairos, in my meditations on decision, it’s like my soul is cradled in the core of the earth, surrounded by churning pressure, protected by my own polarity, yet comforted by a globe of as many possibilities as there are longitudes and latitudes. This spherical frozen shape in time is what I call organic choice. There are no external frames reducing the number of options I can choose from.
Too often, the ‘real world’ I was taught to fear as a teenager imposes constraints while promising immense possibility. The local manifestation of that here in rural Indiana is too often a democratic election with uncontested candidates. The digital reality is an internet of convenient applications for the price of your personal data—with no way to negotiate what access you give or privacies you protect. The financial reality is that anything worth having, health care, childcare, local goods, and a conscience, costs three arms and a leg!
Shifting baseline syndrome, which is often used to describe people’s depleted acceptance of natural resources generation after generation, can also be used to explain the poultry state of American choice, which so often present binary options. Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Decisive, recommend that decision makers first widen their options—but not by a factor of infinity.
Freedom is not a choice between 2 options, let alone between two bad options. Freedom is the globe of infinite possibility--allowing us to choose complexly, with nuance, thoughtful reason, or carefree impulse. But, infinite possibilities for the future can also be overwhelming. When struck by that overwhelm, I recall the Heaths’ advice to keep 3-5 options available. With 3-5, you drastically improve your odds of making a good choice without falling into decision paralysis. So instead of coordinates, I think in terms of North, South, East, and West. North is when I decide to take Michelle Obama’s advice and “go high.” North, to me, is generosity, compassion, noble behaviour. South, “going low” is its antithesis. That physical description of a choice is so natural isn’t it? Going low and going high?
In this country, whose constitution is framed with the ideals of liberty and justice, our choices in a post-Milton-Friedman world are subject to the tyranny of a shareholder-obsessed economy. Every choice we make must make money this quarter or next. Our greater future is subject to the decisions of business leaders with short-term perspectives using algorithms built on datasets collected on the basis of confirmation bias. What healthy futures does this constraint withhold? What about all the good intent which does not produce profit?
When an economy and society is filtered for the intent to generate profit, a globe of possibility suddenly get narrowed to a pinhole that I’ll generously estimate as the size of Spain.
The world is lousy with good intent! Especially this time of year.
We intend to finish our to-do lists. We intend to work out, eat right, reduce/reuse/recycle better, save more money, invest wisely, put our phones down, travel, get a good job, spend more time with loved ones, train our pets, or figure out a non-awkward way to hang up the phone at the end of a call. A British study of over 3,000 people found that 88% of New Years resolutions are broke, including 68% of promises just to “enjoy life more.” Many of us are lousy with our own good intentions! But why? Well, the world is too often a lousy recipient of good intentions.
Quickly, I want to share the Heath brothers’ 4 villains of decision making as we go into the new year of decisions.
Villain #1: Narrow framing. They suggest that you “widen your options” (to 3-5).
Villain #2: Confirmation bias -> Solution: Reality test your assumptions.
Villain #3: Short-term emotion -> Solution: Attain distance before deciding. We’re more likely to make brash decisions when we feel strongly about something. It’s always reasonable to ask for time to decide.
Villain #4: Bad forecasting -> Solution: Prepare to be wrong.
Tetlock has 10 commandments for people who want to forecast the future better. My favorite is #10: Don’t treat commandments as commandments.
But what should we do to make choices to generate the future we want? Well, for starters, release what you think of as a good decision.
In the context of a church, there are many things we should know to guide our decision making for the future. For instance, did you know that churches are the number one recipient of charitable giving? (24%--2nd place goes to human services (14%)? So, financially, churches are better positioned than most entities to address some of our current challenges. Socially and physically, these spaces hold the community we crave and which we need to decide on and build a better future.
Unitarian Universalism’s 5th principle, the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within congregations and society at large could benefit from the work of people like Craig Freshley, author of Together We Decide. I read his book in the light of my Christmas tree two years ago, now I’m grateful to call him a mentor and friend of mine. In his book, Craig emphasize another principle that UU’s share, the first, the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Everyone has a truth that’s necessary for us to hear to make the best choice. Everyone has a vision for the future to consider. Adrienne Maree Brown, another decision facilitator, agrees.
In her work, Brown describes emergent strategy as how we shape and generate complex systems and patterns through our own relatively simple interactions. In our increasingly digital world, simple interactions are engagement is your algorithmic control panel. Use it to tell your feeds to bring you balanced content. If algorithms must rule our decisions, know that you can shape and influence the algorithms meant to engage and influence you. Quickly create digital data points by exploring content for and from various perspectives and creators—even if you only engage with uncomfortable content briefly. But, mainly, like and share hopeful things.
Save hope as a gift to your future self. Practice suspending your scepticism. Nobly guard your hope from the onslaught of our culture’s negativity bias. Protect your faith in the inherent value of all life and all people has possessing truth and humanity. Engage with hope wherever you find it. Share it with others to embroider hope on your memory, where it will catch eye and nail the next time someone challenges an optimistic future you know to be tied in the present.
In closing, I’ll quote Adrienne Maree Brown, “Nature moves in small fractals of interdependence, accumulating nonlinear changes and creating more possibilities with the constant adaptations of a resilient earth. If we attend to nature’s lessons, we can remember that we, too, are nature; we can unveil our own organic gifts, our way to the future together, our path to thriving in this abundant world.”
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Thank you so much for allowing me to speak to you today. There are bingo sheets in the back of the sanctuary. Please feel free to take one, share your hopeful things, and utilize a fun and evidence-based method to keep your resolutions. Put them on your fridge compete with your partner. First one to get a bingo gets to choose how to pronounce your name!
