Indecisiveness

[Void]

You have trouble with it?

I'm nearing my second decade of double digit age, and I have to choose what to do with basically the rest of my life, but I'm having a hard time with it. All these open doors, and they're all so shiny! What if I go through one of them, and it locks behind me? Then I can't go back. I can't accept that. I want to try the other doors as well. You know, a catalyst is the same before and after a chemical reaction. But the only way I can not change whilst still going through all these possibilities is by thinking about them. You can always take a step back when thinking. Not so with doing. And all these responsibilities. 'You have to do this'. No I don't. Why? There's always a choice. The only responsibility you have is to choose. And I choose to be and do everything! I don't settle for less! But you can't. You can't open a door that is permanently shut. And I can't stand the thought that because I chose to do A, I can't do B. So I do nothing, which ironically sometimes cancels out both A and B. Instead of taking a bus to somewhere, I imagine all the possible landscapes and cities I could go to. Instead of drawing a line on a piece of paper, I imagine all the shapes and colors that could be on it. Instead of taking a step in a direction, I grab my mental binoculars and see where it leads to, only to be distracted by something on the horizon. Metaphors. And so I do nothing, for that is the closest I can get to doing everything.

How 'bout you?

 

[Vrecknidj]

Looks more like avoidance, or an unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of adulthood than indecisiveness.

That said, indecisiveness is a problem for INTPs, so, yeah, I'm going to guess a lot of us will admit to having trouble with it.

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

What you see:

Spoiler

[bimgx=600]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/MarkoffNumberTree.png[/bimgx]

What actually exists:

Spoiler

What could happen:

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7DKxe_m1AM

What happens to most people:

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ou-bhlgneM

 

[BigApplePi]

Here is a technical answer. If you have to or want to choose between A and B, then you bring all your powers into deciding the best choice. If it comes out even then you are in balance. Reminds me of the donkey who couldn't decide to go left or right so it starved to death.

My technical answer is your choice is not just A or B, but also C = starve to death. So you flip of coin and choose A versus B, not because A is better, but because choice itself allows you to move forward.

I encounter this all the time during the day. It doesn't matter which goes first, A, B, C, or D. So I just pick one and let the others lose out. One can always fantasize about those others later and realize one had to choose.

 

[Marcel]

Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers.

Such fools are also called idealists by those who wish to praise them. But all this clearly applies only to their weak subspecies, those who cannot comprehend reality or who, in their melancholic condition, avoid it. These are people in whom the lack of a sense of reality is a real deficiency. But the possible includes not only the fantasies of people with weak nerves but also the as yet unwakened intentions of God. A possible experience or truth is not the same as an actual experience or truth minus its "reality value" but has - according to its partisans, at least - something quite divine about it, a fire, a soaring, a readiness to build and a conscious utopianism that does not shrink from reality but sees it as a project, something yet to be invented. After all, the earth is not that old, and was apparently never so ready as now to give birth to its full potential.

To try to readily distinguish the realists from the possibilists, just think of a specific sum of money. Whatever possibilities inhere in, say, a thousand dollars are surely there independently of their belonging or not belonging to someone; that the money belongs to a Mr. Me or a Mr. Thee adds no more to it than it would to a rose or a woman. But a fool will tuck the money away in his sack, say the realists, while a capable man will make it work for him. Even the beauty of a woman is undeniably enhanced or diminished by the man who possesses her. It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it. Even so, it will always be the same possibilities, in sum or on the average, that go on repeating themselves until a man comes along who does not value the actuality above idea. It is he who first gives the new possibilities their meaning, their direction, and he awakens them.

But such a man is far from being a simple proposition. Since his ideas, to the extent that they are not idle fantasies, are nothing but realities as yet unborn, he, too, naturally has a sense of reality; but it is a sense of possible reality, and arrives at its goal much more slowly than most people's sense of their real possibilities. He wants the forest, as it were, and the others the trees, and forest is hard to define, while trees represent so many cords of wood of a definable quality. Putting it another and perhaps better way, the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of realty which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there's any bait on it. His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the bait is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. An impractical man - which he not only seems to be but really is - will always be unreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him that to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea. Today he is still far from being consistent. He is quite capable of regarding a crime that brings harm to another person merely as a lapse to be blamed not on the criminal but on the society that produced the criminal. But it remains doubtful whether he would accept a slap in the face with the same detachment, or take it impersonally as one takes the bite of a dog. The chances are that he would first hit back and then on reflection decide that he shouldn't have. Moreover, if someone were to take away his beloved, it is most unlikely that he would today be quite ready to discount the reality of his loss and find compensation in some surprising new reaction. At present this development still has some way to go and affects the individual person as a weakness as much as a strength.

And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities.

http://www.robertmusil.net/work/excerpts/

So I do nothing, which ironically sometimes cancels out both A and B. Instead of taking a bus to somewhere, I imagine all the possible landscapes and cities I could go to.

Lean, taut, and slightly stoop-shouldered, the male LII [Logical Intuitive Introvert] makes a pleasant impression. Men of this type usually keep their hair short. Their clothing style often consists of soft pullovers and well ironed trousers, although they will wear suits on rare occasions.

Most of the time LII male spends submerged in his thoughts, ideas, and important to him undertakings. He makes an impression of being somewhat removed from everyday life and his general behavior is soft and cautious. […]

From time to time, the orderly sedentary LII man gets struck with desire for adventures. When this occurs, he can suddenly (so it seems to outsiders) uplift himself and move, for example, to a distant country - for a new residence or just for the purpose of traveling. To take an excursion across entire Europe using public transportation, for example, is completely possible.

http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/127-Robespierre-Male-Portrait-INTj-by-Beskova