We have more options than ever in modern life, but is that really a good thing? Digital technologies that claim to make our lives easier, like restaurant ratings and dating apps, are all around us, but they usually end up making us feel even more stressed.
In this episode,I speak with Emily Pabst, the founder of Remake the Rules and a decision-making coach. Emily discusses how our lives are being shaped by “choice tech” and how to regain control. We look at the mental traps that undermine our thinking, how having too many options can lead to anxiety, and how to prevent decision fatigue. Emily explains how small business owners, corporate executives, and regular people can simplify their decisions, live more clearly, and reconsider their relationship with technology.
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Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In today’s world, we just have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of choices to make them from. I often make the reference to doing a Google search for something like a therapist, something that a lot of people will look for at some point in their lives, and if you ever look for a therapist, you’ll see a Google search and you may see the people who do, say, the type of therapy you’re looking for, work with the type of people, whether it’s individual, couples, family, stuff like that, whether it’s specific to addiction counseling versus just kind of trying to get a leg up on life, but it’s really hard to know what you really want because you’re going to meet the therapist and you’re going to find out more about the person and whether or not you vibe, and I think that paradigm applies to a lot of other places in life, especially in our technical world where you just have so many choices and so much information and you’re like how do I sort through it all and how do I avoid getting decision fatigue? My guest today is Emily Pabst, and she is the founder of Remake the Rules, a decision-making coaching service.
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Emily, welcome to the program.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much for joining from the other side of town here in Denver. And first, to I guess orient, tell us a little bit about Remake the Rules, because I think the idea may be a little bit new to some people out there listening about someone to coach you to make decisions other than whatever, probably the four or five family members they all have giving them advice.
My background is in information science and data analysis, actually, and, throughout these last few decades, what I’ve really noticed both in my professional and then also in my personal life is that the overwhelming addition to what I call choice tech tools to our lives, so those are going to be tools that are digital information tools that impact how we think, how we feel, and, most importantly, how we make decisions.
And so I essentially help people live and thrive well within this sort of overwhelming information environment that we’ve created for ourselves.
So, give us an example of a choice tech tool that did overpromise, underdeliver, and essentially make things more frustrating.
Sure. I think the number one for many, many people, it’s going to be online dating.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I’ve seen so many videos and essays about how 90 some percent of people involved in it are frustrated with the online dating world, that there’s like this idea that there’s maybe 5 or 10 percent of people that are really thriving in it, and then the other 95, 90 percent are just fed up.
Yeah. I mean, the frustration is absolutely real, and sort of the stance that I take on these information tools, regardless of if it’s online dating, I tend to focus on sort of high stakes environments. So, in many cases, a choice tech tool like online dating has now fully taken over how folks make decisions in regards to who they choose to meet and spend time with and potentially become a partner, a life partner, so this is a very high stakes choice that we are now inviting these technology tools into to be a major part of, but it can be a lot of different things. Small business ownership involves a ton of tools very similar to this that are intended to help you thrive in your business and often are confusing and overwhelming, and same with leading large organizations. Those are sort of the three realms where I work with people most frequently because they are both so inundated with these tools while also really needing the outcomes to be positive and to work productively for them.
So, you talk about online dating, of course, being high stakes because, and possibly even the highest stakes because the person you choose to spend your life with ends up being one of the most important decisions, an important part of it. What would be an example of a low stakes tool that people sometimes maybe think about too much but it’s really just not that highest stakes?
Interesting. Well, so part of kind of the way that I help folks to sort of reframe the frustration and the overwhelm that they’re feeling is how pervasive these tools are, and the pervasiveness of them is actually significantly altering just how we go about our patterns of day-to-day life. So one sort of example significantly lower stakes is how you feed yourself, how you choose what restaurant you go to, how you choose how to get groceries. So there are many, many more information tools that are available to us to achieve that than there were 10, 15, 20 years ago, but because of the advent of them, it kind of disrupted those old patterns, so now we are trying to relearn what really works for us again now that we have so many different options.
This reminds me of a TV show from several years back. Aziz Ansari had a show called Master of None, which I kind of think of as the millennial guide to life myself, and there’s an episode of this show where he gets online and starts researching the best taco truck, I think it is, in his neighborhood, and I don’t even remember what neighborhood, this was many years ago that I watched this, but it’s a neighborhood in New York City, he’s trying to find the best taco truck, and by the time he does all the research to find out which one is, they’re out of food or they’re closed.
100 percent. And also, I think that there’s a lot to be said for the accuracy of that information. This idea that that is something that is available to us through some means, like Google mapping or what have you, these review platforms, it can be kind of accurate for some locations, for some questions, but can be just a very poor option for information in other scenarios.
And I’ve seen a lot of people do this where they’re looking at Google Maps, they’re like, “Oh, there’s a Chinese restaurant at the block and it has a 4.7,” and that’s supposed to signify that it’s good, whereas some other place may have been there that has a 3.9 and maybe it’s not as good, whereas maybe the item on the Google Map with the number of dollar signs is actually a more important indicator because that tells you how much money you’re going to spend on that meal.
Certainly, and it’s conversations like this that I end up having with folks is really just recontextualizing what we’re looking at, what we’re interacting with, what we’re talking about, that sort of has become so normalized and such a strong default for folks, like you want to figure out where you want to eat, the default is to look at online reviews on one, maybe two different platforms. But then there’s ideas about who is completing that information, who is providing it, how it is coming to be, whether or not they are genuine, whether or not they are from a subculture that is going to have the same food ideas and preferences that you do. So I enjoy traveling a lot and I also really enjoy sort of looking at places through the lens of some of these very large platforms because you can really tell when only a very specific population is engaging with it, and that population, if you go abroad, is unlikely to be the population that actually lives in a place. So, there, we can really see an example of how we are just sort of entrenching into a very singular viewpoint, but because it’s on the internet and there’s so much data, it feels like it’s actually really well sourced and well informed.
Yeah, it feels like ground truth, and an example, it has a 4.7, 4.8 rating that almost is taken by most people as ground truth that this is a quality restaurant.
Yes, yeah.
So, with this example, I know this example has nothing to do with business, it’s just kind of a normal life example, where someone looks at Google reviews, they see that number and sometimes they just look at a couple reviews or whatever and then they choose the restaurant, what is the bigger issue? Is the bigger issue the fact that this information may not be reflective of what you really want or the fact that this may not be the best use of our mental and cognitive energy of, okay, this meal might be slightly less good if we don’t do all the success of research versus all the other things that we could be thinking about in life and some of the things that may have higher stakes?
Yeah, certainly the latter.
We have an unlimited amount of energy and information at our disposal at any given time, so making a choice and saying, good enough, and being like, “Well, I’ve had better pizza in my life but that’s okay.” Share on XSo be it versus looking at those sort of higher stakes choices and then really maybe committing some extra energy and some extra time to kind of pulling apart, “Well, how did I get here and why do I think and believe this, and is it really serving me and what I want to know and what I want to be doing?”
So, if choosing a place to eat is kind of the quintessential example of a choice that we put too much energy into because it’s lower stakes, what would be the opposite example? What will be an example of something that’s higher stakes that people tend to, I don’t know, just kind of make on a whim without thinking too much about it?
Yeah, well, I mean, again, I think online dating is a really good example of this and I do think that quite a few people would maybe push back a little bit on that, that it can feel very cumbersome and heavy and energy intensive, but I find that, a lot of times, that is sort of the management of a bad situation energy and not the designing a better situation energy. So what I am hoping to do with folks and I’m working with folks to do is essentially shift that energy so that we’re no longer just after the fact managing a bad situation, a process that isn’t working, and going ahead and putting that same energy into making some changes, to really improving the design of how we’re interacting with these tech tools so that we get the positive potential out of them that they keep promising.
All right. And then, so when you talk about tech tools, first of all, let’s get a little orientation about who your client base are, what the group of people that we’re talking about making these tech tool decisions?
Sure. So it is going to be anybody who feels like –– so very commonly, I have folks approach me that are like, “The universe has told me that this tool is going to fix all the problems that I have. I am actively using it and all I get is frustration. I do not seem to be getting the outcomes that I want.” So those are the folks that I work with, and that happens in a huge spectrum of parts of people’s lives, but that is really the problem that I am working with people, both from like the coaching perspective, because what people prioritize, what they want to do, how they want to spend their time is deeply personal, and a lot of times, we spend a lot of time kind of figuring out what do you really want your relationship with this tool and with the proposed outcomes of this tool to really look like? And then, on top of that, I layer in my information science background, so we can say, okay, let’s go ahead and crack this process right open and we can go ahead and talk about some of these now really mandatory skill sets for the 21st century, these ideas about probabilistic thinking, these ideas about default choice-ing and sort of allow people to arm themselves with a new perspective that better matches this new information environment that we are all inside of.
So what I’ve observed a lot is a lot of people adopting some kind of a tool, and this might be a little bit different than the tools I usually talk about, but a tool, say, Scrum, which is a method of engineering delivery in technology circles, and people often say, “Oh, we need to be doing Scrum. We need to be doing Agile development, because that’s what everyone else is doing,” and not necessarily thinking either is this right for my team or how is this adaptable to my team. The most crude version of this statement I make is, “Well, Google’s doing it so we need to do it,” type of mentality. Is that something that you’re encountering quite a bit?
Certainly. A pattern that I see is folks who are tremendously capable, tremendously competent, very intelligent, and just absolutely overwhelmed. And, potentially, especially with my small business owner folks, but also with the executive leader folks, they have an incredibly high skill set. It is not in information science and technology, right? So they are kind of in this very uncomfortable situation where they are deeply invested in positive outcomes and they keep sort of getting handed these tools that really promise a lot but are not fully sort of contextualized within the precise problem that they are trying to solve, because the folks who want them to purchase the tools are not super incentivized to go ahead and pull that entire process apart. I often will actually be brought in as sort of a person who is translating between the two. That is, saying, “My number one goal is to solve the problem you’re actually working on but from a more technical perspective, we can actually evaluate this tool and see if it truly fits your needs.” I have so much compassion for the position that a lot of people are in because the world is just changing right from under our feet, and keeping up is not often an easy task or even a strong possibility, and this is kind of where the picking and choosing battles really comes in.
Well, this seems to me like it belongs in this category of things small business owners, I don’t know, would rather not be thinking about. And what I mean is that most people start a business based on some kind of a passion they have about something. They have some combination of expertise, passion, and market need kind of brings it in. And there’s all these things like, okay, well, content strategies, that’s something that most people aren’t passionate about that unless that’s the purpose of their business. And it seems like the same thing with all these technological adaptation. I even think about payment processing, like every business needs some form of payment processing, unless you’re going to suddenly become cash only for some reason. But no one really comes into whatever product or service they’re selling thinking, “I wanna find the most appropriate payment processor from 10,000, whatever it is, different tools that there are out there for that. I just wanna open an account at Chase and be like, okay, this is where the money’s going to come to my account,” blah, blah, blah, done. So there’s this whole list of things where it’s like exactly as you said, it’s like not what they’re wanting to spend all their mental energy on, they’d rather be thinking about their customers, their employees, their stakeholders, their impact.
Certainly. Since we live in such a digital world, there is so frequently often a very strong digital paper trail that folks are creating, and, sometimes, it is with a ton of labor so if you are maybe running an organization where there is a lot of documentation of what people are doing, whatever your KPIs are, measurements are happening and what I see very frequently is there is an understanding that there is a value to it but that they can’t quite turn the page on reaping the benefits of that value. So they’re kind of stuck in this spot where they’re like, “I’m spending all this time and energy and my staff is spending all this time and energy in collecting this information, but can’t get to that next step because I’m spending too much time on other things, other problems to really take a look at it, to really learn about my operations, about my administration, to make that turn.” And from my perspective, with the tools that are currently available now, that turn should absolutely be happening so we’re going to look at how to, within the context of that person’s business and their desires and the fact that they probably do not want to become a data scientist themselves, how can we make it happen?
And when you work with your clients, is it focused solely on their business operations? You do your work and then you do your other stuff, it all kind of impacts one another with respect to how much mental capacity you have. So, does the rest of your lives come into this play there? Have there been people who’ve needed some tools to really sort through some other, I don’t know, my kid’s soccer practice or something like that?
Yeah, for sure. And I think this is where our work overlaps so much is, I joke that the conversations that I end up having with folks are like 40 percent practical, 60 percent existential.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, because I think it is important for folks to figure out the extent to which they want to invite and incorporate some of these tech tools into their decision making and into their lives, not even from a perspective of is it doing what you want it to do, which is very important and should be considered, but also from the perspective of is this how you want to interact with information? Is this how you want to live and exist and understand whatever it is, X, Y, and Z? Online dating, I think, is a really good example of this one where you have a lot of folks now who are just like, “I don’t wanna have anything to do with it. I don’t wanna have anything to do with it,” which is absolutely a reasonable choice for folks to make. I think that there is still an argument for online dating, but a person figuring out individually the degree to which they want to incorporate that into their lives is something they’re going to have to figure out.
So it sounds like another thing, another common aspect of what you’re looking at is this idea of defaulting, that we have a bunch of defaults, and online dating has kind of become a default, which is weird because I’m actually old enough to remember when it was considered less desirable. I remember when ––
Absolutely, yes. It’s a weird thing to do, like you were a weirdo, absolutely. Yeah.
That’s the one that AOL chat room to meet people, everyone else is just meeting people through their classes and whatever after school activities or whatever non-weird people did or didn’t have the courage like to walk up to someone and start talking with them or something.
Yeah, and I think it’s so important to think about that difference and how short a time span that arc has really happened in, and not necessarily because the good old days were better, but just to highlight the change that everyone is attempting to reorient towards, to figure out how to renavigate around.
That is a lot of difference in how we communicate, how we process information, how we build knowledge, and how we make decisions, yeah. Share on XAnd it reminds me of what you said earlier about loving to travel, because one of the things I always talk about when it comes to travel is how travel, if you’re really observant when you travel, reminds you that the way things are done in your city in this particular year, whatever year you’re in, is not the only way things can be done, not the only way things have been done, not the only way things are being done.
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that as challenging as sort of our greatly sort of destabilized patterns and norms have become, and a lot of that is because of the big technological changes that have happened over the last handful of decades, that there is a huge variety of options forward. That choices can be made purposefully and individually that are not just sort of these defaults. And I think that very strongly the defaults that are happening right now is to just add more tech, period. Not add tech after vetting it and believing that it indeed is the best path forward for you, just adding and seeing what happens and hope for the best. And, yeah, and I’m hoping to create a higher likelihood of better outcomes for when we start adding tech to people’s lives.
So, yeah, and I even feel that way with processes and procedures, that the default has always been to add more, like people are worried, “Okay, something went wrong with our business, we had a production issue. Let’s add another layer of approval. Let’s add another document you have to fill out. Let’s add another,” and that right now we’re living in kind of the burnout and exhaustion from just decades of this like add more with very little thought on subtracting from it. Do you ever advise your clients to get rid of something or to offboard something to kind of simplify the tech stack they have in their lives?
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of times, we can absolutely improve processes with less, because, at the end of the day, if it is unsustainable in its quantity, none of it is going to do you any good, right?
Yeah, I grew up in New York, I have the accent, and it took me a long time to get to that feeling of actually craving less, because, in New York, more, more, more is currency and how important you are is dependent on how many things you have in your schedule, and if you don’t have an hour to spare for the next six weeks, oh my gosh, you must be the most important, have the best life ever. So it takes a while to get out of that mentality, because I assume that a lot of people, even people who come to you and say, “Okay, this tool was supposed to really deliver this and it didn’t,” might even be weirded out still by the idea of, okay, maybe we need to try to do less or we need to kind of simplify some of these things.
I have a deep interest in psychology too, like I really consider the work that I do but also just what fascinates me to be a collaborative hybrid human tech systems. So like humans are major players in whatever is happening with this sort of tech integration, collaborative decision making with information tools people are doing and identified cognitive biases, the additive bias, which is this idea that people tend to want to solve problems by adding instead of subtracting, exactly what you’re discussing. So that is something that, evolutionarily, we tend to fall back on and rely on, and it’s easier to sort of fall back on these cognitive biases when our brains are already exhausted and overwhelmed, so this is kind of where we start seeing these cycles happen when we have this choice inflation, so much information, so many decisions to make, I have to redesign my entire life because, literally, no generation of human beings has ever lived this way before, which I think is really important to remember. We have a lot of work that we are trying to do and figure out because of that. And it means that, yeah, we can become overwhelmed.
Say, 200 years ago, someone has a general store and you’re the owner of general store, the choices you’re making are usually, one, should I stock this person’s product on my shelves? And, two, when or if you need to change the price of any item. And that’s kind of pretty much it. Maybe advertising in a newspaper would be another one. There was no TV, not even radio yet, so we went from a world, and it’s good that you bring up the entirety of kind of human history because that’s the world we’re evolutionarily trained for, thinking about 100 years ago is when people started getting radios into their houses and that kind of escalated upward through what we have now so we’re talking about four, at most five generations of humanity, not nearly enough for our brains to really evolve to that, we’re really evolved to that level of choices of that general store in 1825, that just got to decide if Farmer Fred’s lettuce is worth stocking on the shelves.
Our brains are designed to work with small scales, small numbers, what we can experience with our eyes and our ears and our nose and our hands essentially. That’s it. That is the information that we have evolved to process. And now, we are working with literally an entire world’s worth of information that we can access in these super computers in our pockets. It has really changed the game of what we are sort of being asked to understand and to process and to contextualize. And we humans have created ways of managing greater amounts of information. We have created social technologies, like history and like mathematics to sort of deal with these big time expanses or these big information expanses so that we can create sort of coherent stories that make sense to us.
Yeah.
And a very recent one relatively that we have created to deal with incredibly high volumes of data is statistics. So we have created a science for ourselves to figure out how to deal with this. That being said, not every person can or wants to be a statistician but we all live in this super high volume information world. So how can we sort of bring some of those skill sets and these ideas and update our thinking and our processing for sort of a big number reality when we have a tendency to move through it in sort of the small scale, small number thinking? Yeah.
Now, I’m obliged to ask because who I am and what my business is, how much of it is trying to limit the amount of unnecessary information we’re consuming, the notifications on our phones and everything like that, like you’re trying to make a decision about your business, you don’t necessarily need to hear about someone’s commentary about a world event or whether or not someone liked your Instagram post from yesterday.
Yeah, certainly. I mean, I am very purpose driven and person driven, so I like to take it from the perspective of discrete problem and sort of the desired outcomes. And, generally, when you really get down to it, talking to a person, they’re like, “It is not important to me to be notified every time an app wants me to pay attention to it,” because that’s what that notification is doing. It is an indication that this tech tool that we have invited into our life in some sort of capacity wants your attention and that that is its priority but not yours, so that is kind of where we start refiguring like, okay, then how can we shift so that you are once again sort of recentered in these patterns of behavior that you are building, in this decision structure that you are building so that you are putting it back into you and what you want and the way that you want to use your brain and your time and moving it potentially away from these tech tools that do not align with those goals?
And are there any tech tools out there now that are actually improving people’s ability to reclaim that? Are there any tech tools that are helping people, I don’t know, just clutter through a lot of this noise?
I am pretty neutral when it comes to tools, because, for me, the proof is in the pudding. Does it help or doesn’t it? And if it doesn’t help, is that because we have a use issue where a person is struggling to use it, or its potential positive outcomes, because
for taking you in the exact opposite direction of your greater goals. And so then it becomes a question of why is that happening? Is it a collaborative issue between me and the tech or is it the tech? And then we kind of move forward from there.
And that leads me to my broader assessment of this entire thing, because when I think about the world of 200 years ago, before we had any of this technology, your options were quite limited and, obviously, we had the food supply issue where we had to employ half the world, if not more, in agriculture, just to get people fed, which we don’t have anymore, but also a lot less things were open to you. You were born in a small town, your only job options were whatever jobs were in that town. And you can even say the same thing for, you’re lucky enough you were born in New York City, there’s still probably a lot of things that weren’t available to you in the exact place you lived. Now, we have everything open to you so you can connect with anyone you want to, you can connect with any service you want. You want a therapist, for example, it doesn’t necessarily have to be someone in your city. You could be, like us, over Zoom doing it. So we’ve kind of connected everyone with everyone and everything with everything, but I think the issue right now is that how do we sort through it? Because now that everything’s an option, once again, as you said, with the whole human brain processing, you’re no longer deciding, “Do I wanna be a pharmacist or do I wanna be a blacksmith?” you’re now deciding, “Do I wanna be…,” and the list could just go on and on longer than that shrimp guy in the Forrest Gump movie.
And I think one of the perspective shifts that folks really have to make with that environment that you’re describing 200 years ago where they’re just like you’re choosing among ten things best case scenario, that’s what we’re talking about, and now you have the potential to choose between 100,000 things, and because of that, I think it was easy for folks to really want to seek the best outcome. So now we are kind of discussing superlatives of a small number scenario, which is problematic in and of itself because depending on what you’re looking into, like who to marry of the ten potential single whoevers, you still have a capacity to make a poor choice in that regard. Like information is still restricted, there’s still a lot of societal concerns, there’s probably a lot of stuff that you are still prioritizing that is not going to make a happy life for you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but now we’re still kind of bringing that best mentality into the 100,000 scenario realm and that is going to be painful and ineffective and not possible all around. So, it is really, I think, a mindset that often is unconscious that really sets folks up for failure instead of shifting to what I would sort of pull people towards, which is I want a good outcome. What I actually want is a good outcome. I don’t want to eat at the best restaurant in the world, I want to have a good dinner, and sort of shifting to that and then recognizing how one perspective is tremendously problematic in the information realm that we live in and one perspective is really feasible for a very nice time and a very nice life in this information realm, as I think can be really resetting for folks and can really kind of lower the temperature on the stress and the expectation too.
Yeah, because if I think about it, and this is where the online dating really comes into play because if you have, you grew up in a small town 200 years ago and there are like just ten classmates that are within three years of age range in your sixth, seventh, eighth grade class to really choose from, then you really do want to try to get the best possible fit for you, of those ten because that’s pretty crucial. But then, when you have 100,000 options, all of a sudden, you could have probably have a bigger risk of never making a decision than making a poor decision and so, therefore, out of 100,000, all you have to do is be in the top 25 percent and you’re probably going to end up with a pretty good result.
Yeah, and it also is kind of built on this idea that in a tremendously complicated and uncertain dynamic, which is two people attempting to partner with each other for an extended period of time, that there are going to be things that you will just not know and that you cannot know, and so the proportion of uncertainty that you’re going to be dealing with is higher than most people are comfortable with, but that that is a part of it as well.
And that’s another area where other societal trends is being added to the number of choices, if you consider acceptance of homosexuality, polyamory, all this other stuff, all of a sudden, your options just exploded and then they explode even more when you add those things to the mix.
Yeah, and I think that is one of the really positive things about online dating or just the capacity to access and connect with so many more people is that folks can really seek out community, whatever that community looks like. So, for the folks who feel like that they can say, “Never again, ever online dating,” and that they’re able to sort of meet folks that they really resonate with and can make community with in the wild, wonderful, more power to you. That is not the case for many people. Many people do not feel very welcomed or comfortable or they’re likely to make sort of intimate partnerships with the folks that they encounter on the day to day capacity and this is where I continue to want to improve online dating. I acknowledge that it’s a big struggle for tons of folks, and same with all these tools, but there is the capacity for a lot of good too. So how do we actually get there? How do we get at the good and minimize the frustration, minimize the pain?
Yeah, because I see the advantage in that. If you have ten options, there might not even be that great of one, whether it be dating or with careers and stuff, but you simply go to 100,000 options, it definitely gives the possibility that you’ll find a better fit, where it’s like, “Okay, do I wanna be a pharmacist or a blacksmith?” but maybe with every career around there in the world, there’s going to be something that was way better than any of those options were for you. So people can find happier places, it’s just a matter of cutting through the noise. And so I’m just wondering how well you think, how will you feel we have been doing and are doing with regards to cutting through the noise to actually realize this potential of connecting everything with everything?
I think huge spectrum, huge spectrum. I think some folks have really found a sweet spot for themselves, but I think the majority of folks are really struggling. From the perspective that I take, which is this sort of like longer arc perspective of this information landscape that we exist in is truly like nothing human beings have ever had to manage before, and human beings do not have a good track record at doing things right the first time so we’ve got a lot of figuring out to do and I think that you can see that struggle everywhere.
I see it every day with people’s habits around technology addiction, social media, smartphones and everything. My grand hope is that with this AI more powerful tool coming, we’re going to learn the mistakes we made in implementing smartphones and social media into our lives and do it better with this more powerful tool.
That would be great. That would be great. And I think it comes down to the human side of it, how we evolve individually and socially to manage this new environment, to manage these new tools in a way that our individually supportive but also pro-social and we are really, really still in the thick of it, trying to figure out what that looks like.
Yeah, and I know there are definitely people pushing it in many different directions. People who are very aware of this, very aware that humans have social needs that we need to take into account and other people that want to just kind of make a more powerful version of what we’re already doing, which could lead to some disastrous results.
If this was a cut and dry scenario, and there’s a lot going on with this technology and how our brains work and both like the lizard part of our brains, when we just love those flashing lights and things, but then also the frontal lobe part where we really have these complex goals and considerations of what we are attempting to achieve and how to achieve it. I don’t think it is cut and dry as to what that path forward is, and it’s certainly not go tech-ify everything, go hard, like, get rid of these meat sacks that we all live in, we’re all robots now, and I don’t think it’s going to be get rid of all of it either, so now we have every other option available to us other than those two ––
Yeah.
Yeah, right? And I think it’s so interesting that you are certainly trying to put those tools in people’s hands to at least make space to start making those choices, to kind of step away, step away, and then see what else it can be, like what other options there are for folks, yeah.
Yeah. And, ultimately, it’s kind of the same thing that you advise your clients on, which is just being intentional and thinking through like what do I want my relationship with this tech tool to be, like do we want this scheduling management system to suddenly control my life or do I want to use it in a different way?
It’s like wild to think that this is where we are. I’m not even determining how to collaboratively work and relate with humans anymore. Right now, I have to figure out how to collaboratively relate to humans and all of these twisted tools too, but that is where we are, yeah.
Yeah. Anyone unfortunate enough to be in the job search process knows that they’re all trying to get a resume by basically an algorithm, the applicant tracking system.
One of the projects that I love the most working on people is how to hire, so actually working with folks that are attempting to hire right now because, I mean, talk about something that’s been turned inside out and upside down, and also talk about something that didn’t work super great to begin with anyways so it’s a fun problem to solve.
Yeah. I mean, the latest Gallup poll from last year, 31 percent engagement across the country, even lower if you consider globally, so whatever, never worked that great but, obviously, we haven’t found a way to make it work to the point where –– like that really frustrating process would be a little bit less frustrating to a lot of people if it oftentimes way more frequently got people into the job that really worked for them.
And I think that is another area where folks are kind of stuck on the best so another area where you may be used to, until more recently, be able to think that way, but now that folks are getting 500 applicants for every job that they open, you’re dealing with a totally different beast.
You’ve brought up some cognitive biases before, and if I were to make a poster in my room and list out the four most important cognitive biases I need to kind of account for in everything I think about and look into, what do you think those cognitive biases would be?
I think what is going to be maybe most useful and most important for the most number of people is to acknowledge that cognitive biases exist to begin with Share on Xand, essentially, the only thing that cognitive biases are are these sort of energy saving ways that the brain thinks and makes decisions. That’s all it is, just energy saving ways for the brain to think and make decisions, which means that when you’re low on energy or you’re using that energy for something else, so you can be tired, you can be overwhelmed, but you can also be like panicked, fight or flight, that energy is going elsewhere, your brain is going to start relying on these sort of energy saving processes. And when that happens, they have a few things in common. Simplicity is the big one and being quick, so you’re going to make choices quick and they’re going to be simple choices, which, when you’re in danger, when you have to make a choice and you’re exhausted, that’s where you’re at, that’s what you got to do. So, it is certainly a positive aspect of our evolution so that we can continue to help ourselves and to make choices even in bad scenarios, but that that is what they are for, to continue to move forward and make choices in bad or lesser scenarios. So when it feels like you are tired or you’re a little overwhelmed or you’re a little freaked out, just to acknowledge that that is likely also what is happening too, and, if possible, to just give yourself some grace and some time to recuperate and to move forward. Don’t stress yourself out when you pick a bad restaurant, it’s fine, and then go ahead and allow yourself to recover and maybe save some of those more complex decisions for a time when you’re in a little bit better energy space.
Well, that is a wonderful way to put it. And, Emily, I’d like to thank you so much for joining us on Action’s Antidotes today, talking a little bit about, well, quite a bit about decision making, not only the biases we have in it but how we can actually think through it. The general idea of getting over this idea that you have to have made the exact best decision, the perfect decision with everything you do, from dating to hiring someone to orienting the plants in your garden to selecting what brand of iced tea to purchase, that it’s okay that maybe you got the third best option out of a hundred instead of the best option.
Totally fine. Yeah. It’s going to be totally fine.
And I’d also like to thank everybody out there for listening today, for taking the time, you had a lot of choices on how to spend your time today, not just with podcasts but with every other type of content out there, you could be watching someone pop a head out of a toilet on YouTube instead, but I’d like to thank you for choosing to spend time with us here in Action’s Antidotes and hope that you can make the right choices to make the kind of life that you really want.
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About Emily Pabst
Emily Pabst is a ChoiceTech Consultant and Holistic Decision Coach helping people and organizations rethink how they interact with information, systems, and uncertainty. With a rare blend of technical fluency and human-centered insight, she works at the intersection of decision science, digital architecture, and personal growth—especially in areas like online dating, business overwhelm, and leadership strategy. Through her consultancy, Remake The Rules, Emily empowers clients to untangle complexity, collaborate more effectively with modern tools, and build decision-making habits that actually serve their goals. If you’ve ever felt stuck in analysis paralysis or unsure how to move forward, Emily offers something most systems don’t: actual transformation.