Tough vs Difficult

I took an unexpected trip to California last week, to care for my mother-in-law.  On Monday, my wife got a fabulous job offer in another state, but our high school sophomores, being high school teens, are convinced that moving will destroy the very fabric of their lives.  And as a backdrop to all of that, there's been a crisis at work, and it is performance feedback and compensation season.  So I've been thinking a lot about tough decisions, and how we make and think about them.

Here's the thing: these are tough decisions, and can be gut-wrenching... but they're not difficult.  My mother-in-law cannot both live independently and also call EMTs multiple times a week to get her out of bed because of pain.  My wife absolutely should take a job that doubles her salary, moves her up in rank and institutional prestige, and is populated by a bunch of her best friends.  My company absolutely should make sure we're reliable as job 1.  A difficult decision is one where we can't get the data to figure out what the right choice is... and none of these, including the perf and comp ones, are that.

Where things get tough isn't the decisions, it's the repercussions.  Those are legit painful, and I don't minimize that... but it's not the decision that's tough.  My mother-in-law is deathly afraid of assisted living, and flat refuses to leave her friends... but three ambulances a week isn't an option, so pick one, or commit hard to doing the dang PT.  My wife should take that job, so we're either dragging our high schoolers across the country despite their threats of mental-health harm, or we're separating the family for two years... and either option is tough, but deciding to do one isn't difficult. Right now deciding which is a difficult choice, but we can look into the options (data) to decide which is least bad. Then it'll merely be tough again.

And, at work, it's tough to decide that we need to de-prioritize or even cut things to refocus on reliability work (on my team it may impact our GA timelines, which is near and dear to my heart)... but the actual decision isn't difficult.  It's only sucking up what the decision means that is painful.