A Decision vs. a Cup of Coffee

While I was jogging this morning, I realized I had told TJ something that wasn't completely accurate over lunch yesterday. TJ is a co-worker. Technically, he's my boss, but he's the good kind who is more of an engineer than a manager, so I feel like co-worker may be a more accurate description. What I said to him wasn't any sort of deliberate lie, just a misrepresentation about my reasons for my actions. He had asked me if I would go for a cup of coffee. I shrugged and said, "sure". But as we went through the drive-through, he didn't even bother turning to ask what I wanted, or even if I wanted anything. He knew from past experiences that I didn't drink coffee, and my "sure" only meant that I was willing to chat with him while he sipped a cup.

At one point, our conversation turned to why I didn't drink coffee. After all, I had lost faith in my religion (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) almost a decade ago. Wasn't I curious? Didn't I want to explore the freedoms I had won by breaking out of my religious chains? I stumbled through a flimsy explanation, trying to conjure up the actual reasons for my behavior. But my explanation felt weak. Apparently, it seemed weak to him too because his conclusion was, "You are still ruled by a religion you only claim to have broken away from."

This morning, the air was unusually crisp and it was still dark out. As I jogged into the light of a street-lamp, and then plunged into darkness again as I continued on, I marvelled at how poorly I had managed to articulate my actual reasons the previous day for continuing to deprive myself of the experience of finding out how coffee tastes. Then the truth suddenly struck me. The reason I could not express my reasons was because I wasn't following reason. I was following a feeling.

I like to think of myself as a generally rational person. But my brain is simply not big enough to hold all the reasons for all my choices in a place where they can be accessed in the time it takes to respond to a question asked in a spontaneous conversation. Feelings are much simpler than reasons. Reasons require the brain to encode connections to words or concepts. And that occupies a lot more cognitive space. By contrast, feelings don't require much space in a memory at all. So for purposes of cognitive efficiency, choices I made long ago are often compressed and encoded as feelings. When I need to make a decision, the promptings of subtle feelings are all I really need to remember my decision. Alas, they are not quite sufficient to enable me to explain why I am doing it.

The reasons I ended up giving for my on-going abstinence from coffee were not accurate. They were post-rationalizations of a decision I had already determined to make. That is, they were just me trying to figure out why I had made that decision. There was really no question about what I would do. I already knew what to do, I just couldn't quite remember where I had filed the why.

...I guess I just needed to jog my memory.

More than two decades ago, I was conversing with someone about my sister who had lost her testimony. I remember expressing that I didn't think she had really stopped believing, as she claimed. I thought she just wanted to sin, and that desires for sin have a way of overwhelming one's thinking, until they no longer even know when they are being honest about what they truly believe. Some subconscious thread in the depths of my mind must have briefly recognized the pious pomposity of that arrogant verbal defecation. It pointed a finger of accusation back at me and said, "When you lose your testimony, you will have to keep following the teachings of the Church, or you will be a hypocrite." I rolled my eyes and responded to that silly thought with a smug, "Good." It was an inconsequential thought anyway--I was certain I would never lose my testimony. I would ensure that never happened by choosing to believe, no matter what.

There is a principle in machine learning referred to as "garbage in, garbage out". It basically says if you train a model with bad data, you cannot reasonably expect the model to make useful predictions. This principle made a lot of sense to me when my academic advisor taught it to me because my dad had taught me the same principle many years earlier. At the time, in the mid-1980's, our family was gathered in the living room in our home in Sandy, Utah. I had made some impolite comment to my sister. My dad scolded me in the gentlest and most stinging way possible. He quoting a scripture:

...for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. --Matthew 12:34

He knew at the time I was a sincere person. He knew I didn't want to have a cold or judgmental heart. So these words made me realize that if unkind remarks were coming out of my mouth, there was already a much bigger problem that needed to be addressed inside.

This morning as I jogged, I found myself contemplating what kind of garbage had somehow gotten into my heart in the mid 1990's that had caused me to say something so caustic about my sister, ...at a time when she was exercising the moral integrity to do what was right, but immensely difficult--to walk away from a false and abusive situation, despite the disapproving whispers of every member of her family, including--to my eternal regret--myself, entirely on her own.

Here's a little time-line, in case you are having difficulty following my stream-of-consciousness story:

Little did I know I would eventually find myself in a similar situation. In the early 2010's, I reluctantly came to accept that my religion was not true. I had actually been aware of the evidence that exposed my religion as a fraud much earlier, at least since the mid-1990's. But I had also made a deliberate decision to continue to believe anyway. My dad had taught me to make decisions before I was forced to do it under pressure. This made it easy to make good choices when I had more time to contemplate them. It was a good teaching. And at the time I thought sticking with my religion was a good decision. And the more I acted on that decision, the more it overwhelmed my thinking, until I no longer even knew when I was being honest about what I truly believed.

(Just in case you missed it, that last sentence echoed the same judgmental statement I had made about my sister in the late 1990's. You are now supposed to realize the same thing I realized while I was jogging this morning--that my harsh words that day about my sister had actually been a projection of something that was in my own heart.)

I don't know how long I could have maintained my willful refusal to admit the truth if no other conflict had ever arisen. I suspect I could have done it indefinitely. (Jump to the early 2010's now.) But suddenly I realized I had children who looked to me as a source of accurate and reliable knowledge. I had also accepted a position at a university, where I would teach young and impressionable minds how to identify what was true, and discern it from what was not. Somehow, when I had made that decision to believe in my religion in the mid-1990's, despite the evidence that it was not actually true, I imagined that my choices only affected myself. Because of that oversight, I had made the wrong choice.

My dad had always taught me to be honest and courageous. When you know some decision is right, there is no need to sit around fretting about the consequences. You just do it.

...but I really didn't want to do this. Leaving my religion was so hard, and so scary. It required a blind leap into the unknown, in a direction opposite of countless warnings that I had always tried so sincerely to heed. I decided I wouldn't reverse my course unless I was directly commanded to by God himself. Since I have already documented that story elsewhere, I will not rehearse it here, except to say that as I reluctantly faced a command I really did not want to hear, I also made a decision to continue following teachings I no longer believed in. I'm not sure how much that decision was really influenced by that subconscious thread in my mind that pointed an accusing finger at me in the late 1990's. Perhaps I am just post-rationalizing my choices, but as I jogged down dark streets this morning the connection seemed to make a lot of sense.

So for the last near-decade I have believed all those voices in my head originate from my own sub-conscious mind. And from our previous conversations, TJ had been made well-aware that this is what I believe. So as I sat in his car, he asked me how long I intended to follow teachings I did not even believe in. "We both know there is no God looking down and judging us for drinking a cup of coffee", he noted.

Incidentally, my dad had died earlier that day. I could probably get away with blaming the awkwardness of my answer on the grief or heavy thoughts that were distracting me at the time. But the real reason I wasn't able to give a satisfying answer was because I didn't know the answer. My choice was based on a feeling. And that feeling was based on a decision I had made long ago. And the reasons for that decision were buried deep in an obscure filing folder located in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in the seventeenth row of the fourth room of some part of my long-term memory. That's how my mind works. In the moment, every choice is the response to a feeling, not a complex construct of reasons. Reasons are what I contemplate in those quiet moments, when I an deciding what kind of person I want to be.

A week ago, I had a phone conversation with my sister. We knew my dad was approaching imminent death, and my mom had already started making funeral plans. My sister expressed some concern about being singled out as the only child who wouldn't be singing "Families Can Be Together Forever" at his funeral. I promised her I would support her by also declining to participate.

That promise wasn't only to show support for her, although that would have been more than a sufficient reason. I have been refraining from singing most church hymns for several years, now. There's something about vocalizing an affirmation of doctrines I no longer believe that feels deeply dishonest and wrong. Perhaps, no one else really listens to the words I sing anyway. And I can hear the words I am singing. My dad taught me that the real measure of a man is what he does when no one will ever know.

When my mom called to inform me that my dad had died, the phone kept breaking up. While some technological gremlin was interfering with the signal, I caught the words "sing", "families", and "forever". As soon as I discerned she was probably talking about her plans to have us sing at the funeral, my prepared mind wanted to leap into action. But it didn't feel like a great time to take my stand and inform my mother that I would not be participating in her musical number. It felt like a time to offer kind words of assurance. So I offered a non-committal "hmm", followed by some irrelevant words of positivity. And now I have a complexity I'm going to have to deal with. I really don't want to offend my mom. And she most certainly will be offended by this--deeply offended.

My mom is aware that I no longer believe. But it is somewhat similar to the way I was aware of evidence that the Church was not true from the mid-1990's to the early 2010's. Evidence makes no difference when someone makes a deliberate choice to look past it. Because she will not allow herself to believe that I do not believe, I find myself compelled to hurt her again every time she asks me if I am still praying. A person who believes he was defrauded does not labor to believe he was not. Even if he can look on those former days as times of blissful ignorance, he does not seek to return to that state so he can be defrauded again.

As TJ put it, "you always choose the red pill."

I certainly don't want to cause further pain for anyone, especially my mom. TJ's advice was to just plug my nose and sing the song. "Who cares?", he asked, "It will make her feel good. And there's no reason to rock the boat." Since I tend to be slower with reasons than the people I talk to, I couldn't immediately see why his advice was so wrong. But my feelings came out in a blaze of passion. Could I get up there and sing while knowing I had abandoned my sister, as I had done before? I could not.

Some things are apparently just too complex to explain. There is no way to explain to my mom that I am trying to stand for virtues as dad taught me to do. She will see me as petulent, calloused to her feelings, and disunited from the family, at a highly sensitive time. There is no way to explain to TJ how important it is to me to live deliberately, and how that means being consistent with the feelings I planted myself. He will continue to see me as being ruled by a religion that I claim to have broken away from. There is no way to explain to the people that surround me how they are hurting each other by choosing to follow traditions over evidence. They will continue to view unbelievers as prideful and self-interested rebels who just want to sin. I recently tried to explain that to my sister, who parted from our religion even before I did. But she just thought I was trying to push my beliefs on her.

Being an honest man is more lonely than my dad made it seem. Sometimes I just wish people would take the time to hear my actual reasons. I work so hard to scrutinize them and make sure they are right. But by the time I manage to find where I filed them, the conversation has always long-since ended. My dad was more right than I realized. The measure of a man really is what he does when no one will ever know.

Update: *sigh. After I wrote all of that my mom called. It went badly--very badly. Following the conversation my wife commented, "Well, that went about as badly as it possibly could have gone."

Another update: My wife read this article. She said, "You never explained why you didn't drink the coffee." She's right. I never really did explain that.