The Decision You'll Make in a Similar Situation Six Months From Now Is Already Mostly Determined By a Pattern Set Today
A decision that hasn't been made yet feels, from the inside, entirely open — genuinely undetermined, waiting to be shaped by whatever considerations arise when the moment actually comes. For a decision that falls within an existing recurring pattern, this feeling of openness is largely an illusion; the pattern doing the deciding is already in place well before the specific moment arrives.
The pattern that will produce next year's version of a familiar decision isn't formed at the moment of that decision — it's formed by the accumulated weight of every similar decision that came before it, each reinforcing the same selection rule a little further, until the rule is doing most of the actual work long before the next instance shows up asking to be decided.
This is uncomfortable to accept precisely because it removes the sense of fresh agency each new instance seems to offer — but it also creates real leverage: if the pattern is already mostly set today, then changing today's instance of it is changing the thing that will otherwise determine the next several instances, not just this one.
The decision six months from now hasn't been made. But the mechanism that will most likely make it largely has — which means the highest-leverage moment to affect that future decision isn't six months from now. It's today, in whichever instance of the pattern is currently in front of you.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai