Choice
Posted: July 22nd, 2009 | Author: brian | Filed under: Random Musings | Tags: Random Musings |When you travel and are able to spend some time away from your life and surroundings as you know them, you have time to think.
As I spend time with my new wife and celebrate another birthday, I once again come to realize the amazing power of CHOICE.
There is always a choice.
We often forget that simple fact and suffer because of it. We feel trapped, stressed, anxious, and defeated because we forget that there is always a choice.
it’ true. we all have choice. but what about this? i’ve found that sometimes having too much choice ruins you because you spend so much time thinking about what is the best choice to make. which leads to feeling stressed and nervous (think: maybe i’m not making the right choice…)
for example, if you can live anywhere in the world and eat anything in the world and buy whatever you want, what would it be? if you can create your favorite lifestyle and actually live it, how would you live. the only snag would be that you will still die when you are oh-so-80 or 90. i think this is a lot harder than people think.
if you really think about, the simple answer of wanting to live next to a beach sipping margaritas everyday until you die doesn’t quite do it. because you will be bored and with that life, some parts of your life would be unfulfilled. thus, you would have to be engaged with the current world somehow. but how and on what terms would be the appropriate questions.
the ultimate end point of death actually makes you think quite hard about it, because if you live a life for only power and money then you die, you didn’t play enough. if you only played and simply consumed, then what was your contribution to society? if only consumption is the end goal, then isn’t it too hopeless? both as an individual as well as a society?
You definitely bring up the other extreme, but its like the other side of the same coin. At the end of the day, it’s about “perspective”.
A person can feel just as trapped by the feeling that there are too many choices as a person can feel about not having a choice. They both feel a similar pressure that causes they not to choose. But what’s interesting about both cases is that we overvalue making the “right” choice.