I’m bad at making decisions. That is, I’m bad at making decisions between two virtually-indistinguishable options. I have a good friend who can testify that when I was furnishing my new apartment, I spent 10 minutes at an IKEA rending my garments and gnashing my teeth in the process of deciding between designs for a throw pillow. It can become unbearable selecting toppings on a pizza, or what movie I want to watch on the assorted streaming platforms. I suspect that, while I may have a particularly bad case, society at large is suffering from Skyrim Thinking.
In Skyrim, the player starts out as a blank slate; each skill you develop by exercising it. For example, you get better at offensive magic by shooting fireballs, or lockpicking by breaking into chests. There is no formal class system such as in Morrowind, where from the beginning, you are pushed into developing a specific archetype by selecting a class (and a star sign) from the very first building in the opening town, forcing a selection of playstyle before the game even properly begins. Skyrim keeps the concept of the star sign, but hilariously gives the player so much flexibility that you can actually select a new star sign by finding different checkpoints around the map.
By giving the player so much more choice, Skyrim arguably lowers the value of those choices. This phenomenon is so famous that it actually became a joke within the community. You would start a run with some novel character archetype in mind – perhaps a Khajit brawler, or a High Elf necromancer – and would always eventually digress into a stealth archer, because it’s always more effective to develop those particular skills on the tree rather than whatever you had planned.
Personally, I enjoy Skyrim quite a bit more than Morrowind, but I think it speaks to a greater socio-psychological issue: we are afraid of making choices that rule out others; in other words, we are afraid to discern. There is an apocryphal quote that’s been floating around the Catholic world for a few years – “ever since discernment became fashionable, nobody’s made a decision since.” However, properly understood, this is exactly what true discernment ought to be – I select my wife at the expense of all other women; I select the priesthood at the expense of one more1.
This is one piece of the puzzle in the dating crisis; we have so many options that all of them come with fear and resentment of having excluded the others. I’ve experienced this in my career, as I expect others have as well – coming out of college, I didn’t want to concentrate on any discipline within electrical/computer engineering, because I was afraid of losing all the other knowledge I had gained while obtaining my undergraduate degree. Even though I radically disagree with the aesthetic preferences of Gesha Marie-Bland in her article "Against Toddlercore" (I’m personally pro-oversized-everything when it comes to clothes), she quite validly points out the relative nothing-ness of Gen-Z fashion – “potato-sack silhouettes” and a “common, innocent face for the masses” suggest that our identity is found in no identity; we have implicitly committed to no commitment.
The remedy I propose for those suffering from Skyrim Thinking is choice for the sake of the goodness of making a choice. Within my own life, and perhaps in yours, the consequences of choice paralysis are actually more destructive than the consequences of bad choices, and we must plant a tree in the void of fertile undefined space even if it turns out to be the second-most-optimal-tree. We must trust in God’s providence, not that we will necessarily make all the correct decisions, but that He will give us the grace to clean up when we don’t. If He is pure actuality without potentiality, then perhaps actualizing our potential is a step towards theosis.