Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about philosopher L.A. Paul, who writes about transformative experiences, and the impossibility of making rational choices in the face of them. For example, should you have kids? As she explores in “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting,”  until you do have kids, there’s no way to know how your life would change, or how you’d feel about those changes, if you did. Which, in turn, makes it impossible to rationally evaluate the decision in advance. Or consider a similar thought experiment, from her book Transformative Experience: imagine you have the option to become a vampire. Should you? Problematically, there’s no way to know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, so there’s similarly no way to know what to choose. As she puts it:

When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it — by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

Most of Paul’s work revolves around choices that transform our lives. But these days, the world itself seems to be transforming around us, regardless of what we choose. Which, similarly, seems to construct a veil of ignorance between us and the future.

I felt that acutely this morning, trying to do some project planning. Normally, I genuinely love to strategize and plan. But, today, I found it hugely frustrating. Sure, all plans are subject to change, expressed intentions that inevitably shift as they confront reality. But good plans are still built around some set of baseline assumptions; in normal times, how life and the world is now is at least more or less how it’s likely to be in the near future, too. In the midst of a pandemic, however, that’s certainly not the case. In January, the idea that the entire country – indeed, most of the world as a whole – would be hiding out at home 24/7 would have seemed unthinkable. Now, it’s hard to imagine when, and how, that’s going to end.

And as I tried to plan, even in the wake of the huge, recent changes, I also found it hard not to continually bias towards normalcy, not to expect a sort of life regression to the mean. I mean, six or nine months from now, how could New Yorkers still be wearing masks full-time and social-distancing everywhere they go? I just can’t imagine them keeping it up. Yet, on the other hand, I’m equally unable to explain a version of the future in which they don’t, without things spiraling into an even more catastrophic COVID surge.

So, facing that all, I’ve been trying to plan in ways that optimize optionality – paths I can push forward on in the here and now that still yield at least incremental progress in the widest array of possible futures. And I think I’m getting somewhere, slowly. But there are so many unknowns – known unknowns and unknown unknowns – that the whole thing feels slippery enough to make my brain hurt.