On Choices
Today, I made the choice to write this essay to explore my personal thoughts on choice. In a weird, recursive way, I am deliberately making choices on words to use in order to describe the nature of choice. When I think about choice, I am given a set of options, each with its own pros and cons, each leading to a future outcome. To make a choice is to confirm the trajectory of your life path, no matter how insignificant or life-changing.
One of the biggest challenges in life is making choices based on incomplete information. We can only use heuristics based on our past experiences and intuition to guide us towards a suboptimal choice. There will never be perfect choices in life, only tradeoffs and compromises. It often feels like a game of poker, where you are dealt a random set of cards and forced to make critical decisions based on whatever is in front of you. Thankfully, unlike poker, most choices in life don’t involve gambling.
I want to believe that choices offer us infinite possibilities, opening to us countless doors to exciting future opportunities. But given my personal circumstances, I may be limited to a select few metaphorical doors. When I open a new door, another one closes. While I may be able to turn back and try other doors, I may discover that some of them have been locked for good. Often, I find myself avoiding certain doors on purpose, afraid of whatever monster may be lurking behind each unmarked door. And so I move on and look straight ahead, lest my face betray any hint of terror of the unknown.
Am I in control of my choices? Or do my choices control me? Do I follow my fickle impulses and rush towards a decision? Or do I painstakingly deliberate over all my available options? Of course, the answer to most of these questions is “It depends.” With so many choices these days, we seem to either sit on the fence or undergo analysis paralysis when faced with indecision. To not make a choice is to stay in place, allowing external forces to make the choice for us, coercing us into an outcome we didn’t ask for.
Two days have passed since I wrote the previous paragraph on my first draft of this essay. In between writing sessions, I had made numerous choices that may or may not matter in the grand scheme of things. I wish we had all the time in the world to make important choices, but every time I am forced to make one, it feels as if someone started the hourglass timer in a game of Boggle, and I have to scramble to form words out of the random letters.
There are definitely some choices in my life that I don’t regret, like not smoking, not taking drugs, not mixing with the wrong crowd. As for the choices that I may regret, maybe not now but later in life, they include not socialising enough, not exercising enough, not reading as many books as I should. For better or worse, these choices have shaped me into the individual I am today.
At this point, I was mulling over the illusion of choice, where you are given false options in which most outcomes are undesirable. It then occurred to me that I often face a different dilemma, that being the “mirage” of choice. Much like the mirage in the desert, this “mirage” manifests as a choice I could have taken, but feels so far away from me. I often encounter it when I find out another friend just got married, when a group of friends hang out without me, when a writing competition went under my radar and it’s already way past the deadline. Another phrase that encompasses this feeling is probably the “fear of missing out”, but its meaning has become too diluted through popular use. Whenever I find out an opportunity has passed me by, I usually shrug it off and not pay it too much attention. There’s really no point in dwelling on what could have been.
To be, or not to be, that is the question. Throughout my life, I’ve made choices that have made me stand out from the crowd, but also isolated me because I took a different path. Sometimes, I make wonderful friends along the way. Very rarely, I make adversaries that want nothing to do with me, and vice versa. All the while, I am alone in my choice, having to bear the responsibilities and consequences that come with it.
As I’ve entered adulthood, I find my choices carrying more and more weight. Even a simple choice can cause cascading effects that will have repercussions only tangible years from now. Even though I consider myself a long-term planner, I can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the unknowns of future outcomes. Come what may, I can only do so much to mitigate the risks of any given choice. No choice is ever easy. Once I’ve made up my mind, I need to take a deep breath and brace myself to face the unknown. Only then I can let go and allow destiny to take its course.