Fight or flight?

Fight or flight? Stay or quit? Pursue or relinquish? Invest or exit? Nurture or dissolve? In different forms, we face this choice everyday on issues ranging from the mundane to the life threatening. Our ancestors all the way back to the cave man faced the same question many times over. And other species face this stark choice everyday, too.

Not only that, the choices we make in response to this question can mean the difference between staying alive or not, staying in a job or not, investing in a business or not, staying in a relationship or not, pursuing a new opportunity or not ... pretty significant consequences, wouldn't you say?

With the benefit of a million years of experience, Mother Nature (or evolution if you prefer) has hard-wired some of the obvious choices in our heads. So thankfully, when we find ourselves in the path of a speeding truck, we don't start a process of deep reflection to assess our chances of fighting it - we instantaneously jump the hell out of the way! This instinctive response keeps us alive, exactly as it is meant to.

Where we get in trouble is with the less obvious choices that modern life offers us. You've had a five year relationship with a great guy, but the guy has not proposed. Meanwhile, you're not getting any younger. Should you persist? You've put a lot into your marriage of five years, but it just won't work. Should you continue to fight for it? You've been at this job for the last six years and done very well, but now your new role and new boss both stink. Should you quit? You've started a small business which has done reasonably well and seems to have growth potential, but you need to invest even more for a few years before you can see a profit. Do you invest? What do you do with that stock that has "long-term growth potential", but has gone south ever since you bought it? Stay invested or cut your losses?

Words of wisdom abound, and are unabashedly in conflict with each other. Does "persistence pay" or is it better to "live to fight another day"? Is it true that "when the going gets tough, the tough get going", or is it just plain foolish to "throw good money after bad money"? Your guess is as good as mine.

Learning from one's own and others' experience can help, but only to an extent. While you can draw some parallels and distil some general principles, it remains true that no two situations are alike. Even you yourself are not the same person you were ten years ago, and so will not be the same person ten years hence.

Astrologers, numerologists, palm readers and the like offer the perfect solution by knowing the future and using that knowledge to help us make decisions. Yeah, right.

Often, even after you've made your choice, you will never know the answer to the "what if" question: that is, would you have been even better off or even worse off making the other choice? So we're not necessarily as much wiser in hindsight as we might like to believe!

I was talking to a decision scientist who made an interesting point: make the less choice binary, given all the uncertainty. The key is not to think in "yes/no" or "go/no-go" terms, but to think in terms of "decision horizons, exit timing, exit triggers and exit strategies, and review regularly". Sensible as that sounds, I wonder if it also fuels confusion and loss of focus.

At the other end of the spectrum, my father has a very different approach. His response is, "live or die, but never run away from a fight (or challenge)". Is that courage or egomania?

With such limited knowledge and foresight, are we really making "choices" or "best guesses"? If all our agonizing over these choices leads to making educated guesses at best, is it even worth the trouble? Or is it better to just "go with the flow", do your best and leave the outcome to ... whom? God? Destiny? Or blind chance?

What do you think?