I’m writing this up not to encourage or discourage similar choices but to walk through how I was thinking about it and humanize a choice I expect some of you think was reckless and inconsiderate.
I’ve never seen this phrase “humanize a choice” before. Nor has Google apparently, which returns only 1 prior instance across the entire internet.
This meaning is something like “showing the human factors behind a decision”. It’s generally used in cases where a choice might initially be hard to sympathize with until you understand how a person ended up in the situation and how they thought about it.
After including all variants you listed plus a few others, there are still less than 100 total instances across the internet. So it seems very rarely used.
Possibly because it could get confused with ‘humanize’ as ‘human-ize’, which wouldn’t make sense. As choices, decisions, etc., don’t have an independent existence.
“humane-ize” would be the more sensible reading:
humane : marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals
i.e. ‘making a choice with/having compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals’
Yet the implications still differ somewhat from “showing the human factors behind a decision”. Considering your intended meaning I think this is one of those cases where shortening a phrase increases ambiguity too much.
I think he was asking the reader to empathize with his choice in life. Life is about survival. Survival is about coping. There are a lot of different ways people cope with existence, striving for good career, high status and money, having children to make life seem less lonely, go find people to socialize and people who can empathize with you when you are depressed. Because of COVID, a lot of people have to cope harder now. Having to cope harder makes coping not as effective as they used to be. “Humanize a choice” means “Please be empathetic with my choice during this dire times.”
I’ve never seen this phrase “humanize a choice” before. Nor has Google apparently, which returns only 1 prior instance across the entire internet.
What’s the intended meaning?
This meaning is something like “showing the human factors behind a decision”. It’s generally used in cases where a choice might initially be hard to sympathize with until you understand how a person ended up in the situation and how they thought about it.
Searching [humanize the choice] and [humanize the decision] turn up a few more examples—does that help?
After including all variants you listed plus a few others, there are still less than 100 total instances across the internet. So it seems very rarely used.
Possibly because it could get confused with ‘humanize’ as ‘human-ize’, which wouldn’t make sense. As choices, decisions, etc., don’t have an independent existence.
“humane-ize” would be the more sensible reading:
i.e. ‘making a choice with/having compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals’
Yet the implications still differ somewhat from “showing the human factors behind a decision”. Considering your intended meaning I think this is one of those cases where shortening a phrase increases ambiguity too much.
I think he was asking the reader to empathize with his choice in life. Life is about survival. Survival is about coping. There are a lot of different ways people cope with existence, striving for good career, high status and money, having children to make life seem less lonely, go find people to socialize and people who can empathize with you when you are depressed. Because of COVID, a lot of people have to cope harder now. Having to cope harder makes coping not as effective as they used to be. “Humanize a choice” means “Please be empathetic with my choice during this dire times.”