Choice. The word brings with it a very positive meaning - the availability of options, each to be examined and airily discarded until the perfect (or at least, best among the lot) is settled upon. We like nothing better than having the luxury to choose, be it a toothpaste from among the twenty brands jostling on the supermarket shelf or the option to try Vietnamese cuisine tonight, Jamaican tomorrow and Gujarati the day after. We make dozens of these choices every day, some little and some life changing. We revel in having more options open to us than previous generations, be it as consumers or choosing our career paths or the way we live our lives.
Sure, choice is important and so is having alternatives open to us. But doesn't it feel like overkill sometimes? Flicking through two hundred channels and not being able to settle on anything to watch or standing every day in front of piles of clothes and lamenting "I have nothing to wear!" makes me wonder if it wasn't better when all I had was DD1 where comfortably settled down to Chandrakanta (yeah you watched it too) or five outfits to choose from which took all of five seconds to pick out.
Sometimes, not having a choice can be a good thing after all. A childhood friend of mine spent all her years growing up wanting to be a doctor, but after multiple attempts wasn't able to make it through and had to glumly settle on a career in IT. Years later she told me it was the best thing that happened to her, that she loved her job and probably wouldn't have enjoyed practising medicine as much. This happens all around us, when being forced into something we would never have voluntarily chosen, a sort of Hobsonian choice if you will, turns out to be far better for us than any choice we could have made on our own.
The value of choice also depends upon the way the choice is made. I for one, have drifted through life picking out things on the basis of what I do NOT want. It's not that I wanted to study economics, its that I couldn't bear the thought of being a mass-produced engineer; it's not that I wanted to enter the world of finance, rather I couldn't see myself mustering the high energy levels to take on sales, and so on. I never think much about what I'd like so much as what I definitely, absolutely want to avoid. Then there are people who made the same choices as me, but after carefully evaluating their options and deciding that Plan A would give better returns than Plan B. There is a third category of people who make choices in quite the opposite fashion, the spunky lot who pick the alternative they know is risky, because for them life without a bit of a gamble is no life at all. And then there are the people who agonise over every choice and can never choose at all, and hence are forced into one or the other just by virtue of all other options having passed them by. If we all ended up at the same place, then what exactly is the value of having had that choice at all?
All this is not to say that we should have no options at all. I like being able to choose what to read, where to spend vacations or who to spend my life with. It's just that sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. After all, there's a reason they call it being "spoilt" for choice.
Originally written on Jan 3, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment