Imagine that you are given the chance to become a vampire.

All of your friends and family have already taken the leap. All of them are vampires and they absolutely love it, and tell you that you should join them. It’s a lot of fun, and you can even drink animal blood to avoid harming humans. You get to be immortal and you don’t even have to be bitten – you can become a vampire painlessly, in an instant! There’s no downside. Except. 

How can you be sure you’ll be happy as a vampire? It’s an irreversible decision. Even if you know you’ll be happy, it means you won’t be a human anymore. You’ll be someone else. Something else. And there is no way to know how it will feel until it’s too late to go back to who you were before.

The “Vampire Problem” is a thought experiment by philosophy professor L.A. Paul. While vampires thankfully aren’t real (unless you count those squashy-faced bats), we face similar dilemmas in real life. Should you have a child or stay child-free? Should you have an irreversible, preventative medical procedure? Should you sacrifice the next 10 years of your life to become a doctor? 

Some of these decisions are more dramatic than others. A few – like having a child – are all or nothing. Going to med school, on the other hand, is a progression of events. However, the problem in all of these cases is that we can’t know how we’ll feel until after we’ve followed through with the decision. As Paul puts it: “When we face a choice like this, we can’t know what our lives will be like until we’ve undergone the new experience, but if we don’t undergo the experience, we won’t know what we are missing.”

It’s a Catch-22 that overwhelms our finite, puny minds. How on earth do we choose?

Wormholes and ice cream: why we’re not as special as we think

One possible solution is to obtain experience to get “an idea” of what we’re getting into. But the problem remains: we can’t really know what it will be like unless we do the thing. As Paul says:

You might try to learn about what it is like to be a vampire by gracefully gliding around in a black cloak, staying up all night, sleeping in a coffin during the day, and drinking the blood of chickens. But while this might teach you about what it is like for a human to do these things, it doesn’t give you information about what it would be like for you to do these things as a vampire. ¹

Or to use a real-life analogy: babysitting your best friend’s kid isn’t the same thing as becoming a parent. You know what it’s like to take care of that kid, but you don’t know what it would be like caring for your own – and unless you adopt, you can’t meet your future child before you decide to become their parent. 

The easiest tactic we resort to, then, is to use our imaginations. Or as psychologist Daniel Gilbert memorably puts it, “the poor man’s wormhole.” Since we can’t time-travel to meet our future selves and see how happy they are, we have to settle for imagining how our future selves feel after making the Big Life Decision.

Unfortunately, our imaginations are mediocre. Running simulations in our brain is comforting and even fun, but we are surprisingly bad at knowing how events and choices will make us feel in the long run. There is a solution, Gilbert proposes, that’s hiding in plain sight:

But if we cannot travel in the dimension of time, we can travel in the dimensions of space, and the chances are pretty good that somewhere in those other three dimensions there is another human being who is actually experiencing the future event that we are merely talking about. Surely we aren’t the first people to ever consider a move to Cincinnati, a career in hotel management, another helping of rhubarb pie, or an extramarital affair, and for the most part, those who have already tried these things are more than willing to tell us about them. ²

Why are so many of us uninterested in interviewing other people when we’re trying to make a Big Life Decision? There are several reasons, Gilbert argues; one of the biggest is the fact that we tend to think we’re more special and unique than we really are. But if we are willing to let go of this notion, we’re much more likely to make better decisions — and just as importantly, not worry or overthink those decisions.

Gilbert uses several studies to prove this point, including one that involves one of my favorite foods: ice cream.

One group (A) first got an ice cream gift certificate, then afterward had to do a dull computer task; later, they reported how they felt. Another group (B) was told in advance what would happen and asked to predict how they’d feel at the end. A third group (C) wasn’t told what the prize would be—only that they’d get some prize—and was instead shown one of group A’s reports.

The results? Group B, relying only on imagination, got it wrong. They thought the excitement of ice cream would carry them through, but it wore off fast. Group C, who simply copied what someone else had actually felt, was far more accurate.

This, argues Gilbert, is why it makes much more sense for us to rely on other people’s lived experiences than trying to predict how we’ll feel in any given situation. Thinking about having a kid? Ask someone who’s already had a kid. Are you sure you want to quit your corporate job and backpack across Europe? Try to find someone who’s already done it. 

According to Gilbert, making these Big Life Decisions is not as much of an existential problem as we think – because we aren’t as different from each other as we think. And in its own cynical way, that’s a relief.

Who do you want to become?

“Now hold on,” you might be wondering, just as I did. “Something’s not quite right. I understand why it makes sense to use other people as ‘surrogates’ for things like eating ice cream, but does this really apply to profound choices like having a child or becoming a Zen monk? This sounds suspiciously simple.”

L.A. Paul might agree. “I will not argue that you can’t get information from the testimony of others when you make such choices. You can,” she writes in her book Transformative Experience. “But…such guidance only goes so far, for the information such sources can supply is incomplete.” And this, she argues, is because humans are so complex and different from each other. ³

Now we’re back at square one of the Vampire Problem. If our imaginations are shoddy, if quasi-similar experiences are inaccurate, and advice from other people is insufficient, what options are we left with? Paul has an intriguingly simple solution: it comes down to deciding how you want to discover who you will become.

I’ve faced the Vampire Problem several times in my life, but by far the biggest decision was whether or not to have a child (#2 was deciding whether or not to marry my now-husband). I deliberated for years. I really liked the idea of being a parent, but there were so many variables out of my control. I had no idea what personality or temperament my child would have. There was no way to know how healthy or able-bodied they would be. There wasn’t even a 100% guarantee that either of us would survive the pregnancy. 

And that was only half of it. Besides not knowing who my child would be, I didn’t know who I would become. I was well aware that pregnancy alters your brain.⁴ I knew that beyond changing my lifestyle, it would change parts of my identity and even some of my values. I knew I would be a different person, but it was impossible to know in what way. All of this was, frankly, a little terrifying. 

It was hope and curiosity that prompted me to take the plunge. I was lucky enough to then give birth to my daughter, whom I now can’t imagine living without – even though I existed very happily for 35 years before she came along. I wanted to find out who I would become if I had a child, and in hindsight, I can say that I’m very glad I did. I wouldn’t call it a “rational” decision because it involved too many unknowns, and therefore, I can’t give replicable advice to other people who are wondering if they should have kids. I only know that for me, the desire to discover who I would become as a parent was greater than my fear.

Not having a child is also a decision that will lead you to discover who you will become, even if it doesn’t happen as abruptly. No choice is neutral. But luckily, not all choices are equally important, and so our solutions may vary based on the type of choice.

In the end, I think both Gilbert and Paul have a valid point. In Gilbert’s defense, too many of us do see ourselves as unique and special to the exclusion of all else. And there is wisdom to be found in the experience of others, especially when you survey a larger pool. It may be unwise to choose which grad school to attend based on just your cranky uncle Tim’s advice — but if you ask 10 other people, you might get a consistent answer. Even if that answer is, “it doesn’t matter.”

But for the most difficult, emotional decisions of all, we can’t just look outward – we must look inward. Paul’s advice to choose based on “how you want to discover who you will become” can help us make that choice more clearly, even if the terrifying uncertainty doesn’t go away. 

Anaïs Nin once wrote, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ⁵ It’s hard for anyone to really say whether a choice is right or wrong when the pros and cons are so mixed. What seems clearer, though, is that a life based on choices that are made out of courage, rather than passive fear, is a life that, in the end, will make the most sense and bring us the most peace of mind. 

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Read Next: You Will Never “Find” Yourself →

1. Paul, L. A. (2016). Transformative experience. Oxford University Press.
2. Gilbert, Daniel Todd. Stumbling on Happiness. Kindle ed., Vintage, 2 May 2006. 
3. From Transformative Experience.
4. Pritschet, L., Taylor, C. M., Cossio, D., Faskowitz, J., Santander, T., Handwerker, D. A., Grotzinger, H., Layher, E., Chrastil, E. R., & Jacobs, E. G. (2024). Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy. Nature Neuroscience, 27(12), 2253–2260. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01741-0
5. Nin, A. (1966). The diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931–1934. Harcourt, Brace & World.