On the Quantum Dilemma of Choice: Avoidance, Schrödinger’s Cat, and Fantasy Football

Early in my life, I feared “not knowing.” If I didn’t have the answer, it felt like failure—not just private embarrassment but something visible, exposed. That same impulse followed me into the early years of my career, where I tried to outrun uncertainty by sounding confident and having the right take. I think it was a tiresome performance, not only for me, but sometimes for those around me.

Then a friend—he had survived childhood cancer—told me about being a kid, hooked to machines, watching his family cry as poison dripped into his veins. “The only way through it,” he said, “was to accept it.”

That moment broke something open. Here was someone more at peace than anyone I knew—not because life had been easy, but because he’d stopped treating discomfort like danger. He didn’t brace or bargain or pretend. He accepted.

And that was the thing I hadn’t learned yet: being uncomfortable isn’t the same as being unsafe.

Some things are genuinely dangerous—rattlesnakes, speeding trains, sheer cliffs. Avoidance there is wisdom. But avoiding the discomfort of being wrong, being judged, or not knowing? That’s something else entirely.

So, I dared to be stupid.

I gave up trying to be right all the time and let myself be uncertain and occasionally wrong. I stopped over-preparing. I spoke before I was fully sure. And, unsurprisingly, I felt more solid in myself than ever before.

The Trap of Experiential Avoidance

Most of us instinctively move away from discomfort. The brain mistakes internal tension—shame, doubt, awkwardness—for threat. So we shut down, pull back, deflect.

But over time, avoidance narrows us.

• The person afraid to look foolish never speaks up.

• The one afraid of rejection stops reaching out.

• The one afraid to fail avoids deciding altogether.

The catch? What we avoid doesn’t disappear. It just waits. And often, it grows.

What we resist, persists.

The alternative is counterintuitive: you step toward the thing you fear.

Fantasy Football and the Quantum Collapse of Control

Fantasy football is an odd teacher, but it taught me this: control is an illusion. Each week, I review stats, weigh expert advice, trust my gut—or ignore it. Then I set my lineup.

That’s the which-path moment—the point when all possible futures collapse into one. Before kickoff, my team exists in quantum superposition: both winning and losing, like Schrödinger’s cat still sealed in its box. But once the games begin, the wave function collapses. The outcome is set. No going back.

At first, this drove me nuts. I’d replay my choices, imagine different results. But eventually, I realized: I made the best call I could with the data I had. After that, it’s out of my hands. Low-stakes, sure.

But then one Sunday, it hit me: This is the same dynamic many of my clients live with.

I thought of a combat vet who blamed himself for a split-second decision. A first responder haunted by the one person they couldn’t save. A survivor who made the “wrong” call under impossible conditions.

High-stakes, high-impact—and yet, structurally the same: They observed. They chose. And then they had to live with what followed.

We want to believe that if we do it right, things will go right. But that’s not how trauma—or life—works.

Sometimes, we make the right choice, and it still ends badly. That’s not failure. That’s reality. And when it happens, the task is not to undo the choice. The task is to accept it as best we can, usually, some combination of grieving it, to surviving it, and to moving forward anyway.

Living in the In-Between

Life gives us these moments all the time—the space between action and outcome.

You send the email and wait.
You ask the question and brace for the answer.
You leap and hope the ground meets you.

We don’t get to choose how it lands. But we do get to choose how we show up for it.

Avoiding discomfort doesn’t protect us. It just keeps us small, disconnected, and braced for impact that may never come.

We grow by learning to tolerate the space between the choice and its consequence—and to stay present while we wait.