Lose "It Depends"

As an engineer I lived on “it depends.” Ask me anything hard and I’d load every fact into my head, map the whole web of cause and effect, and hand you a careful answer with ten branches hanging off it. In engineering that’s honest work. Systems are complicated and the real answer usually does depend on the load, the constraints, the tradeoffs you’re willing to eat. I loved that. I still do. Give me a gnarly system, let me hold all of it at once, and I’m a happy man.

Then I pointed that same brain at human health and watched it fail.

“It depends” in health isn’t wisdom. It’s indecision wearing a lab coat. You can read every study, weigh every confounder, hold the whole contradictory pile of literature in your skull, and at the end of it you’ve done nothing. You haven’t lost a pound. Your wife is still on the meds. That web of cause and effect you’re so proud of navigating has navigated you right into stasis. Six months go by and you’re still gathering facts, still respecting the complexity, still too smart to commit, and not one number has moved.

So I quit it. Not the facts, I still love the facts. I quit letting “it depends” be the final answer. Health is the softest domain there is, and in a soft domain you don’t think your way to the right variable, you act your way to it. You cut one thing, you run it, you measure, you keep it or you kill it, and you go to the next one. Ruthless and fast. You find the truth by colliding with it, not by holding it politely in your head.

This is the part the smart people can’t stand. The careful ones who weigh every side, who’ve read more than me and done less. They hear “bias toward action” and they hear a caveman. They want the answer to stay complicated, because complication is where they get to feel superior, and the moment you actually do something you might be wrong, and being wrong out loud is the thing they’re really avoiding. So they stay in the web. Sophisticated and stuck.

Act this way long enough and people hang labels on you. I run my house like a tyrant. I decide, we move, we measure, I decide again. That’s abusive to somebody’s ear, or arrogant, or unscientific, or whatever word makes them feel better about doing fuck-all. I used to care about that. I don’t now, for a reason that’s boring and impossible to argue with: the results are too good. Down a hundred and ten pounds. Effie off a stack of drugs she took for decades. I’m joyful in a way I never was back when I was careful. You can’t argue a man out of a body that works. Call it whatever you need to.

Under all of it is faith, and I mean that plainly, not as a church thing. Faith is what makes you move before the proof is in. You’ll never have the full picture, the system’s too big, so you commit anyway and find out. Doubt is the opposite. Doubt is the little voice going “but what if it depends” at the exact second you’re about to do something, and it pins you right where you already are. Failure at least teaches you something. Doubt just freezes you.

So free yourself from it. Load the facts, then act like you believe.