I really like your post! Thanks for sharing.

There are so many decisions we make everyday, how can we pick which one is best? For me, the most important decision or rather revelation I have come across is to be completely honest to others and to myself. To not attach my identity to any one idea but to make searching for truth my ultimate goal.

The search has led me to a love, happiness and inner peace that I wish more people could find.

I must say it is an inspiring post. I know my English isn't that good to express it that good, but your post got me thinking about my decisions. So I will try :p

The truth is, I almost never make decisions, important ones. I just let myself float along with the others while my mind goes of to other places, thinking fascinatingly about the most mundane objects, events.

I only feel like I have made one decision in my whole life. That was when I saw Jasmijn, the girl of my life. I didn't know how or why, but I had an attraction to her, subtle yet always present. I decided to go for it, say hello, have fun. I am not a religious person, but if I were, I would believe even more, because me meeting her does not feel like a coincidence, it feels like we are meant to be. And after nearly six years, it still gets better every day.

Thinking about the best decision you've ever made, is like asking me: are you proud of one thing in particular? And to me it is meeting her.
I don't feel proud about anything, I always see imprecise little nagging things. But being with her, I just feel at home, I feel the luckiest man in the world, I feel proud :)

I'm glad this thread came into being. To be honest, I was hoping we could discuss more than CSS and HTML. Thank you Impressed for a wonderful post. I love the art of writing and it's my main passion. Maybe I can contribute more in that way? I don't know, we will see :)

Passing by at Camen Design after a long time, heard that Kroc was getting married, met this post, and then, well, challenge accepted.

Best decision I have ever made ? That would be leaving French "classes prépa" after the second year to go to university and study physics.

For those who are not familiar with the French higher education system and do not want to read a big ugly heap of doc on the subject such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPGE, here a quick introduction.

Unlike in other countries, there are two paths to general higher education over here. One is the usual university that everyone knows, and the other is dedicated to engineer and buisnessman formation. In the latter, students first go through a first selection mechanism after leaving high school, based on their results along the high school years. Depending on their results, they will be able to enter more or less prestigious "classes prépas". In these, students are supposed to endure two years of psychological abuse consisting of constant harrassment with more school work that they can deal with while keeping a normal life and a reasonable amount of sleep, on subjects that are conservatively chosen to be extremely boring. After that, there is a second selection phase, based on a competitive examination which assumes that you know everything about the past two years. Depending on how well it goes, you are able to enter better or worse "grandes écoles", which then carry out the remaining three years of a Master's-level formation.

On the plus side, classes prépas and grandes écoles have an insanely high budget per student, force you to work on the _necessary_ boring stuff which you would spontaneously not touch with a ten feet pole, and you get a diploma that until recently had a much higher value on the French work market.

And that's the kind of reason that got me there after high school. I had no clear idea what I wanted to do next, but one thing on which both me and my parents agreed was that in a university context where I was totally free not to study boring stuff, I was likely not to do it. Right from the first year though, I quickly reached a "Fuck. This. Shit" mental state. I definitely wasn't going to ruin my sleep, forget friends, and quit every hobby for the sake of solving impossibly long homeworks on thermodynamics and group theory. I studied the course, understood it, performed well at written exams, but I often ended up not giving some homework back, pissing teachers off by attempting to solve exercises "live" at the blackboard instead of preparing them at home, etc...

Since it worked well enough for the only kind of evaluation that mattered to me (written and oral ones, with a decent time to solve the problem, just like at the final competition), I wanted to see how far I could go this way. Meanwhile, I took advantage my stolen spare time during these years to learn more about the weird concept of girlfriends and practice it a bit.

In the end, it didn't work out so well though. Basically, I wanted to do some original and innovative stuff at work, but did not have the marks it took to make it to the top grandes écoles, the only ones that did not ship preformatted knowledge for a specific number of common use cases. This essentially left me with the following choices :

- Choosing one of the paths I could go by right now, being ill-formed to what I wanted to do and probably doomed to choose a job which I didn't like later.
- Start over the third second year of classes préparatoire, in a worse prep school since teachers where I was were *not* going to take me back. Do the same boring stuff all over again, but somehow with more conviction, with the hope of getting better and solving the problem.
- Just giving up this mess and switching to something completely different at university, hoping that it would be better.

Well, I chose the latter, and between my two main interests (physics and CS), I chose physics because I knew less about it and it seemed to give better job opportunities.

So far, if there's one big choice which I've consciously taken and that turned out to be good without ambiguity, it's this one. I learned about lots of awesome stuff, discovered fascinating job opportunities in research, entered a social group which I like in labs and academia, found out a new interest in teaching which I hope I can practice soon, all that with a comfortable timetable which leaves me the time to still work on my favorite CS subject : a pet OS project.

Right now, as I'm entering PhD in the end of the year, my professional life unambiguously rocks. So yeah, best choice ever.

PS : Concerning the original post, and in particular this part...

“People play too many games these days. Both sexes tend to hide their true feelings and thoughts from each other, but they do it for different reasons. She will do it so she doesn't look like an easy catch; he will do it so he saves his manly face. Both are too fragile and scared to be honest. Several phrases are completely taboo - 'I love you' and 'marriage' and 'commitment' seem to be wiped out of the modern couple's vocabulary the minute they embark on this new relationship. It isn't until long into it (if ever) that they dare to show each other their true self - by then shaking with trepidation that the other may suddenly not like what they see anymore. No wonder people get overwhelmed and stressed and scared by the prospect of a relationship.”

When I read that, I feel guilty of hijacking the normal human mating process. Things really did not turn out this way as far as I'm concerned...