Stop Lying to Yourself
Your Brain Is Gaslighting You Into Bad Decisions
Remember that time you convinced yourself the new JavaScript framework was the right choice? You wrote up the whole technical justification. You presented it to the team. You spent two weeks setting it up. And then, about three months in, you’re staring at the documentation at 2 AM, debugging some weird edge case, and you realize the truth: you picked this thing because it looked good on your resume, not because it was right for the project.
Yeah. We’ve all been there.
Here’s the thing though: deep down, you probably knew it was the wrong choice from the beginning. But you talked yourself into it anyway. You rationalized it. You built a case for it. You convinced yourself and everyone else that this was the smart technical decision.
But it wasn’t. It was the decision you wanted to make, dressed up in logic.
The Problem With Making Decisions in Our Heads
As developers, we make decisions all day long. Which library to use. How to structure this module. Whether to refactor now or ship first. When to push back on a deadline. Whether to take that new job offer. Some of these decisions take five seconds. Others keep us up at night.
Most of them happen entirely in our heads, influenced by whatever we read on Reddit last night, that one bad experience we had three years ago, or just the general anxiety of “what if I’m wrong about this?”
The problem is that our brains are really good at lying to us. They’re excellent at taking what we want to do and reverse-engineering logic that makes it seem like the right thing to do. We’re basically running compiler optimizations on our decision-making process, and sometimes those optimizations introduce bugs.
You know what I’m talking about. You’ve felt it. That moment where you’re justifying something to yourself and there’s this little voice in the back of your head going, “Really? Really? Is that why you’re doing this?” And you just... ignore it. You rationalize a little harder. You find one more reason. You keep moving forward.
And then months later, you’re dealing with the consequences of a decision you knew was questionable from the start.
What Marcus Aurelius Knew That We Keep Forgetting
Marcus Aurelius was arguably the most powerful person on Earth. Emperor of Rome. Controlled the biggest military force in the known world. And every night, he sat down and wrote to himself.
Not proclamations. Not decrees. Not things that would be read by historians. Just... thoughts. Questions. Reflections on his day, his decisions, his fears, his motivations.
Why would someone with that much power spend time writing in a journal that nobody else would read?
Because thinking on paper made him wiser.
That’s it. That’s the whole secret. When you write down your thinking, you can actually see it. You can examine it. Test it. Question it. You can’t do that when it’s just rattling around in your head, mixing with anxiety and ego and whatever you ate for lunch.
Writing is like running your thoughts through a debugger. It makes them visible. And once they’re visible, you can spot the bugs.
How to Actually Do This (Without It Feeling Like Therapy Homework)
Look, I get it. “Philosophical journaling” sounds like something a life coach would try to sell you in a webinar. It sounds touchy-feely and vaguely pointless.
But here’s what it actually is: it’s debugging your decision-making process before you commit the code.
When you’ve got a decision to make, especially a big one, here’s what you do:
Write down your gut reaction first. Before you start rationalizing, before you start researching, just capture that initial instinct. Often your gut knows something your conscious mind hasn’t articulated yet. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written down that first thought, spent a week talking myself into the opposite, and then ended up right back where I started. Save yourself the detour.
List what’s actually in your control versus what isn’t. This is straight from the Stoics, and it’s stupidly powerful. You’re agonizing over whether the tech lead will approve your approach? That’s not in your control. What is in your control is how well you document your reasoning and present the alternatives. Focus on the actions you can actually take. Everything else is just mental masturbation.
Examine your real motivations. This is the uncomfortable part. Are you choosing that new framework because it’s genuinely the best fit? Or because you’re bored with the current stack? Or because you want to pad your resume? Or because you read a blog post that made you feel like you’re falling behind?
There’s no judgment here. I’ve picked technologies for all of those reasons. But you need to be honest with yourself about why you’re leaning a certain direction, because that changes everything about how you should evaluate the decision.
Play devil’s advocate against yourself. Force yourself to write the strongest possible case for the opposite choice. Not the strawman version. The actual best argument. This is where you catch your blind spots. This is where you realize, “Oh shit, I’m ignoring this pretty significant downside because I don’t want to deal with it.”
Set a review date. For big decisions, write down when you’re going to revisit this and see if your reasoning held up. “I’ll check this in three months and see if I still think this was the right call.” This creates accountability to your past self. It’s like leaving comments in your code, except for your life choices.
What You’ll Actually Discover
Here’s what happens when you start doing this regularly: you begin to see your patterns.
You’ll notice you’re consistently over-optimistic in your time estimates. Or that you avoid having difficult conversations until they become crises. Or that you have a serious case of technology FOMO that makes you want to rewrite everything every six months.
These patterns are always there. But when they’re just in your head, they’re invisible. When you write them down over and over, they become undeniable.
I started noticing that every time I was excited about a new tool or framework, I had this whole internal narrative about “learning opportunities” and “staying current” and “becoming a better developer.” And you know what? Sometimes that was true. But a lot of times, I just wanted the dopamine hit of something new. I was bored. I wanted to feel smart again.
Once I saw that pattern written out in black and white, I couldn’t unsee it. And now when I feel that pull toward the shiny new thing, I know to ask myself, “Is this actually the right choice, or am I just bored?”
That’s the power of making your thinking visible.
The Journal Becomes Your Personal Database
After a few months of this, something cool happens: you’ve got a record of your decision-making process. You can look back and see what you were thinking when you made similar choices in the past.
Deciding whether to take a new job? Go read what you wrote the last time you switched roles. What were you hoping for? Did you get it? What did you undervalue? What surprised you?
Choosing between technical approaches? Look at what happened the last three times you made similar calls. What did you miss? What held up? What would you do differently?
You’re building a personal decision-making database. And unlike Stack Overflow, it’s specifically tailored to your biases, your context, your career.
We spend so much time trying to learn from other people’s experiences. Blog posts. Conference talks. Twitter threads. And that’s valuable. But your own experiences? Your own patterns? That’s data you can actually trust, because you know all the context that’s missing from the polished retrospective.
A Few Prompts to Get You Unstuck
Sometimes you sit down to write and you just... don’t know what to say. Your brain goes blank. Here are some prompts that help me get moving:
What am I actually afraid will happen?
What would I tell a friend to do in this situation?
What would this look like if it were easy?
What am I pretending not to know?
If I had to decide right now, what would I choose? (Then ask: why?)
That last one is particularly brutal. Because usually, you do know what you want to do. You’re just scared of committing to it. Or you’re hoping someone else will make the decision for you. Or you’re avoiding the hard conversation that comes after.
Writing it down makes that avoidance visible.
The Part Where I Sound Like a Self-Help Book (But Bear With Me)
Look, I know this whole thing sounds kind of... earnest. Like something you’d find in the “personal development” section at Barnes & Noble. And I get the resistance to that.
But here’s the reality: we’re making decisions all the time that affect our careers, our sanity, our lives. And most of us are doing it with about as much rigor as we’d give to choosing what to have for lunch.
We’ll spend three hours researching which laptop to buy, but we’ll take a new job based on a gut feeling and a good interview. We’ll meticulously review pull requests, but we won’t examine our own thinking when making decisions that will impact the next six months of our lives.
That’s backwards.
Marcus Aurelius knew this. He was making life-and-death decisions for an empire, and he still took the time to think on paper because he understood something fundamental: your decision-making process is your most important tool. If it’s buggy, everything else suffers.
You don’t have to call it “philosophical journaling” if that makes you uncomfortable. Call it debugging your brain. Call it decision docs. Call it whatever you want.
Just write down your thinking before you commit to the choice. Make it visible. Question it. Test it.
Your future self will thank you for it.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: the decisions I regret aren’t usually the ones where I made the wrong choice. They’re the ones where I made a choice I knew was wrong, but I talked myself into it anyway.
And the only way to stop doing that is to catch yourself in the act of the rationalization. To see it happening in real-time. To call bullshit on your own internal narrative before it becomes your external reality.
That’s what this practice does.
It won’t make you perfect. You’ll still make mistakes. But at least they’ll be honest mistakes, based on your actual values and actual reasoning, not just whatever story you told yourself to avoid discomfort.
And that’s worth thirty minutes with a journal.
Quote of the Day:
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” — Marcus Aurelius
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