Day-to-Day Choices

Just to use movie analogies, you could look at this from three perspectives:

• Pay It Forward
• Back To The Future
• Terminator 1,2,3

For the first example, the little choices we make matter because the can directly brighten someone else's day. For what I recall, the premise was very short term and somewhat localized. In the second, the effects of a single change in time snowball into larger and more drastic changes. But still, it boils down to the selection of a day-to-day choice, in this case who does Lorraine fall in love with (George McFly or "Calvin Klein")? And in the last sense, it didn't matter what choices you made, things were destined to happen.

I suppose it boils down to how much you believe in the Butterfly Effect - and I'm not referencing the Ashton Kutcher movie.

A question - what do you mean by "good," as the measure of choices and life?

But even without "good" being defined, your point seems to be that if you have a goal for who you want to be, the way to achieve that goal is to make a series of small choices. It's the idea that choices give a particular bent to who you are. So the point is less about whether your choices affect the world (the Butterfly Effect) or how they work with "fate," and more about the formation of "good" habits as a precursor to wisdom, when wisdom is concieved in terms of praxis.

If it is true that we as humans cannot know what "right" choices are, then our choices may not "matter" depending on what you mean by "matter." But if you have a goal, as the system you presented assumes (for Aristotle it would have been the telos of the individual), then I think it is right that certain frames of mind and habits can be influenced by a series of choices, and those choices and habits and frames of mind could be more or less "good," if "good" is defined in relation to a specific goal.

Years ago I owned an apartment house sort of in the dregs of a declining industrial city. It was not a real bad neighborhood, but it was home to many poor and struggling people. Some of these people were my tenants. Because I lived in the same building as they did, I got to know some of them fairly well, especially when I had to work on repairs in their actual living quarters while they were home. I can remember trying to philosophize about why they seemed to have so much trouble not just with finances, but with seemingly every aspect of their lives. I began to realize after being somewhat immersed in their world (as an observer and shoulder to cry on mostly) that the problem was not with the year to year, or month to month or even day to day decisions that were made, it was really down to the minute by minute or even second by second choices that were made that added up to so much misery. The problem is that having recognized this, there did not seem to be anything that could really be done about it. It is one thing to help people with large and obviously pivotal decisions in their lives, but no one can be (or should be) on top of every subtle nuance of another’s life. I noticed that for many of my former tenants, even if good advice was followed on what would be considered large decisions, those pesky second to second decisions would soon degrade the situation out of control again.