So in church today there were a few testimonies shared that touched on decisions and choices that I found interesting.

First one was from a guy who shared a story that his dad used to always tell him. His dad grew up on a ranch and apparently one day he and 2 other people were out baling hay or something along those lines when one of the supports that a machine that they were using broke. So one guy was essentially holding up this machine (several hundred pounds and more than he could really hold) by himself.

The 2 other guys were kind of looking around not sure what to do and I’m sure kind of in shock / panicking. Then the guy says “Do something, even if it’s wrong”

Then another lady shared something from some training she was in. She is a nurse and I guess has volunteered to be on the county emergency training group or something (little hazy on the details). Basically if there is a county-wide emergency then she gets involved as kind of like a first-responder type thing?

Anyway she said one of the things that they said in the training was that in a disaster, 10% of people will do the right thing, and 10% will do the wrong thing, and 80% of people will do nothing. And how if you do nothing then the disaster will choose for you what happens to you – you are kind of having your agency taken away.

It also reminded me of the Rush song Freewill, that says “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”

On a nerdier note, I’m definitely seeing this in a game I am in. It’s basically a multi-player democracy game of the computer game Civilization. We have teams of 5-10 people that are all playing one civ on the game (there are 5 such teams in the game). So as we are trying to conduct diplomacy, or make moves in the game, we all talk about various things and strategies that we want to do, but then nobody really DOES anything – we all think someone else will do it, or we don’t want to send out that letter until we’re sure it’s the team’s consensus, etc.