I love having choices. When it comes to travel, it feels like the world is my smorgasbord and I have bellied up to have the meal of my life. Libraries and bookstores are like wormholes to other dimensions where I can scan and peruse and read for hours, finding whatever type of story or topic I could possibly imagine. Ice cream shops? I will annoyingly try every flavor if they don’t make a weird face at me first.
I was thinking recently about choices in a different light, though. Like all the ways in which, when we have all the choices in the world, we end up more dissatisfied than if we’d had some small, constrained set to choose from.
Putting aside the exceptions that I know will jump to mind, consider that the vast majority our life - what makes it up, and our experience - is created by our choices. When we lose hours on social media? Our choice. When we feel disconnected from people we care about? Our choice. When we aren’t taking care of our bodies? Our choice.
Yet those don’t feel like our choices. There is such a vast, wide abundance of options for every choice that it almost feels like an obligation to try everything, to pick all of them. It leaves us feeling like our circumstances – all the options endlessly ahead of us – have conspired to corner us into a life we’re wildly overcommitted to, stressed out about, and dissatisfied with. And then we relinquish our power and autonomy to change those things and think “well, that’s just the way it is”.
But the paradox of choice is that having all these options and all these choices makes us supremely responsible for recognizing and claiming that we are, in fact, choosing. We are choosing a night out instead of getting great sleep. We are choosing a job we don’t like because of the financial comforts. We are choosing to feel low energy instead of changing our eating and moving our bodies.
If you knew that having all the choice in the world came with the responsibility to own your choices (trading “I choose not to” instead of “I can’t” or “I choose to” instead of “I have to”), what would you choose?
What will you choose?