Weekend Project - The Illusion of Choice

You know when you have one of those moods? When you really just want to spend an inordinate amount of time doing...nothing. When you're just so exhausted from trying to catch up with things you ought to finish that you wipe out all pressing commitments from your memory and just sit on the porch dreamily gazing into the distance, losing track of your chain of thoughts and then slowly, steadily you inch towards shutting down for a while....when suddenly out of the clear blue sky, an uninvited thought pops up in your head. And just like that, things go awry. You can no longer rest unless you chase that thought until it rolls you under.

So I'm lying on my couch, neither asleep nor awake, minding my own business and suddenly, I have a grave philosophical question lugging in my head, "Is there really such a thing as freedom of choice?" I throw the question back at the universe and then go back to watching some mindless TV. And then for no reason, I pick up the paper. FYI, the papers and I have been mutually exclusive entities for some time. I almost never read the paper these days. Not because I think I'm above it or something but it's just an activity that takes up more time than I'd like to block so it somehow has landed in the bottom shelf of my priorities, only to be buried underneath my constantly shifting scheme for the day. (Somehow Facebook's always somewhere on the top for reasons beyond my understanding.) Anyway, so I get to the Sunday Review and there it goes again. "Success means having the freedom of choice".

Uggh. Foolish thought! Wherefore I'm doomed to depart from my state of blissful dormancy .... Pray, do tell, how do you propose I get rid of thee?

And thus the weekend quest for the truth begins. Truth that will set me free... for the time being. Now it's not crazy that I spent an entire weekend wondering about it, scouring for the answer on the internet and as it is with philosophical questions, I found that there's no absolute answer and that my interpretation is as right as anybody else's. And as it is with such questions, you get all entangled in them and emerge none the wiser.

So here's my analysis. Everybody craves for freedom, and we can't have enough of it - we celebrate it, we get tattoos engraved on our body to symbolize it, we constantly cuss and whine about not having the kind of freedom we'd like and how we're burdened with responsibilities. But how do we know we're free?  I guess by exercising independent choices -the only measure for knowing if we're truly in control of our destinies and determined to live life on our own terms. In theory, it all sounds really simple and inspiring. I mean who wouldn't want to be the architect of their own matrix of infinite possibilities. But even if we had complete freedom and zero accountability, will we really make free choices? That is the million-dollar question.

Totally uncalled-for flashback to the 13-year old me:
Picture a skinny, fragile, amiable sort of girl with serious fashion blunders to her credit, going about her life as usual. Enter a cool, sassy, confident, micro-mini clad girl and by some strange comical law of nature, we bond immediately. So I am still me and I still wear those horrid, ill-fitted, loud dresses with fierce shoulder pads, without really giving it a second look. But now, all of a sudden, I want to be a style diva. I start to despise my clothes and use all my pester power skills to persuade my dad to buy me something stylish and tiny from one of his foreign tours. And my sweet dad, who's all marshmallows at heart, gets me my first mini-skirts. He buys me a really cute and tiny B&W small check-patterned skirt and another tiny dotted wrap-around with matching footwear. Dizzying with excitement, I put on my white tee and the checked mini and for the first time, I look for something other than my sneakers to step into. I can hardly recognize myself and I walk to my friend's house to flaunt my new acquisitions. (They being spidery, long legs.) Her house was on the upper block, at least half a mile away from mine. Of course, I normally hopped, skipped and jumped to her place. But this time, the walk, which began with full-sprung excitement, started spiraling down fast to wretched misery. Reason? The skirt was too revealing, too tight and I didn't feel like me.  And I just kept hoping that nobody would see me on the way but as it normally goes, the whole town, which was otherwise pudgy and lethargic, seemed to be out for a walk that day. So I dodged everyone's judgmental looks and reached her place, trying to gain inches of fabric by furtively tugging my skirt down the whole time. Obviously, my friend loved my new look and she suggested that I stick to it but deep inside, I knew that even though I was bang on trend, my little checked skirt will not get to see the light of day for a very long time.

What I mean to demonstrate through this somewhat inconsequential example is that to a by-passer it may have seemed that I am exercising my freedom of choice in what to wear by donning a really tiny skirt. But you and I know that I chose that outfit because I wanted to emulate my fashion-forward friend and because I wanted to fit in. Did my friend suggest I wear it as it would elevate our status to BFFs? Nope. Did my dad give me grief for wearing it due to which I felt ill at ease? Hell, no. Was I worried that the town would talk about my skanky skirt? Guess not since Mr. X's dangerous liaison with his maid or Mrs. Y's ice-cream guzzling disorder made far better coffee conversations than a teenage wannabe's choice of skirt. So it really boils down to the fact that even though there was no tangible act of coercion, I didn't really make a free choice as my choice got swayed by my mind playing tricks on me, but while I'm at absolving myself of blame, let's call it peer pressure.

Moving on to more meaningful and life-altering choices... Let's examine another choice that we all start speculating on early in life. The choice of whom to be. We all come into this world with own baggage of race, ethnicity, social class, biological make-up.. But then, irrespective of our background, we chart our dreams with a career choice that fascinates us most , say an astronaut, doctor, pilot... As we grow up, the choice moves on to people we'd like to emulate, so if your dad's your role-model, your choice will be whatever profession he is in. Gaining a couple more years, our choice begins to wear the semblance of our interests, passions and skills. While we may have the freedom to choose a career based on any of the premises above, most of us tend to narrow down our choices, as we grow, based on our self-imposed constraints of economic well-being, distinction, and family responsibility, having us tread down the antiquated path of least resistance. It goes without saying that it may not necessarily translate into happiness and satisfaction.

But what about material choices? Surely I imagined we'd have more control over what money can buy, the only real constraint being money itself. But let's take a quick trip to the supermarket. You have a multitude of shelves of  ketchup with varying sodium levels, flavors, sizes and added ingredients.  And you have all the freedom to choose whether you'd like your ketchup with onion, added garlic, chilli, and olive oil. Then you come to the cereal section and there begins another mind-numbing hunt for the perfect cereal. By then, you're already feeling dizzy and you just pick a flavor you like and dash to the next aisle. So what good is a free market of infinite possibilities if it's turning you into a cereal zombie? But the good news is that the explosion of choice at the supermarket totally compensates for our lack of appetizing options in political leadership. (So much for living in a democracy.)

As I start examining some of my mundane choices, it becomes clear to me that the freedom in our free choices often falls prey to frustration, temptation, social pressure, cultural biases and manipulation. Take for example, the choice of deciding your money's worth when taking up a new job. I remember when I faced my first job interview and reached that moment of truth when I was asked by this cocky gentleman in a very God-like fashion, "Tell me. What's your dream salary?" I did a quick math involving the number of dresses I wanted to buy each month and said, " Rs.10,000". And the deal was sealed. It was my first job interview and I was damn well free to ask for the world considering how full of ambition I was. How did I really arrive at that figure? You know the drill. I asked a friend what the expected salary at entry-level is and I played around with the range subtly, just enough to get in. And that's how it usually goes. And here's the downer. Even after years of industry exposure and domain knowledge, and even though my work was billable to the client, I do not get paid the handsome amount the firm billed for my work but the market rate for employees at my level. So then we're not exactly free to choose our money's worth, only whether to accept what an employer offers us or not. And how do the employers determine how much to pay you?  Based on how easy or difficult it is to replace you. So then the freedom to choose what you will get paid is really dependent on others.

Even if we are to discard external influences, we may still not make free choices. Don't we value our own experiences in making decisions far more than the wisdom of others? While we turn to our own memory to search for answers to situations we've encountered before, our memory doesn't quite serve us well and will only show us what we wish to remember. For example, while choosing a restaurant to take your wife for an anniversary dinner, you leaf through a mental memoir of the hot places in town. Your memory gives you a quick recap of all the restaurants you've been to and if it colors your recall with an unpleasant squabble with your friend over dessert or maybe another situation where a romantic date with one of your exes took an unprecedented turn to the four words that killed your relationship ("We need to talk..."), chances are you won't be making reservations there, even if the food and ambience were to die for. Tricky manipulative beast, that brain of yours.

I'm not sure if my weekend was entirely wasted pondering over the mystery of choice and my fallibility in making a free choice. But in my research, I came across this interesting book introduction that probably sums up how we can make more liberal choices - by being self-aware, reviewing our instincts, empathizing with other people's choices, and by being able to identify potential manipulations. It's called the "The Myth Of Choice" written by a law professor, Kent Greenfield. He explores the nature of our choices and provides us with some useful tools to improve our decision-making in everyday life. Definitely intend to check it out.


But there's something I figured through this weekend project. That before hoping that baby Saanvi has all the freedom of choice to create the life she wants, there'll be a lot of homework on self-awareness, personal responsibility and tolerance for other people's choices. Free or not, I want to ensure that henceforth, every choice counts.


References:
http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-Myth-of-Choice-Personal-Responsibility-in-a-World-of-Limits-by-Kent-Greenfield.php
http://tomfishburne.com/2012/01/product-proliferation.html