The Paradoxical Nature of Choice
The world is progressing. New things are happening every day. New products are announced every week. New updates for my iPhone seem to appear much more often than they used to. The world is made easier to live in with all of these advancements. They make life easy. We have so many more options of how to do things.
For example, grocery shopping has been made so easy! I don’t even have to walk into the store anymore. Technology has really catered to those extreme introverts who dreaded every time they needed to go get milk. Now, I can make an order online, picking out what I want, and then go sit in the parking lot at Wal-Mart as they load my car with several grocery sacks full of what I picked out. I don’t even have to make a run to the store if I don’t want to; Amazon has made it easy to get really any product that I want delivered to my own house. In just this past month, a driver has arrived in my driveway with a package from Wal-Mart! I never even had to leave the store to get my Wal-Mart essentials.
The world has indeed been made easier. We have more options.
Options seem really nice. When you go to an ice cream shop, would you take you family to the shop that supplies three flavors of ice cream, or would you drive the extra mile to the shop that provides ten options? I have a feeling that most of us would not even think twice before continuing down the road to the shop where more options are given.
But even though we would most likely always pick the place with more options, that place scares us more than we would like to admit. I think some of us might walk into this second ice cream shop and freeze, staring at the options that span across the wall in front of us, struggling to decide. We stand, immobile, fearing that once we make a choice, the rest of the choices are now no longer available. The fear is: what if we made the wrong choice? When so many options are given for us to choose from, what if choose poorly and then we cannot go back and choose something else?
This multiplicity of choices seems like a great thing. We have so many more ways to do things. Life is made easier when we have so many more ways to do something. We are not as limited as humanity has been in the past.
But we get stuck in this “check” position where having more options benefits the human race by making life for people as a whole easier, but it also makes the individual’s life worse. The individual has too many choices set in front of him/her. He/she is made immobile and unable to choose because of the fear of choosing poorly.
This modern age could be defined as an age when multiplicity of choice has rendered many of us as stagnant. We tend to judge quickly in this day and age, especially when we seem to have everything going well in our lives. There are those who work hard and know what they want to do in life and get up every morning to make it happen. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with being that type of individual. But when our lives are proceeding like that, it can make it incredibly easy to judge those who don’t have everything together.
We can look at others who don’t know what they want to do yet, they don’t work to make something happen, or they just don’t work, and we can see these people as lazy or stupid for not doing anything. Hear me out, there are definitely lazy people in the world. But there are also those who are frozen in place because they are simply too scared to make a decision about their lives. What if they choose poorly? And so, they end up not making any decisions.
This is not the main point of this article, but what if we, all of us, offer more grace instead of judgment? We do not know the situation that someone is facing. Instead of jumping to any conclusions about the state of their work ethic, what if we slow down and get to know their situation? What if, instead of them being lazy, they are actually frozen in this state of fear, unable to choose what to do in life, because they are faced with so many options?
One of my favorite authors is Sylvia Plath. Plath’s life was rather sad, which seems to be the case for most poets like her. Plath suffered a marriage that was not the best and she lived in an apartment with her children that was not the best of places. Her life story is depressing and made even more so when one reads of her death in 1963. Plath ended her own life, and her journal entries reveal the state that she had been in for so long, “I sit down on a clear cold sunny day with nothing to beef at except the slick sick feeling which won’t leave. It comes and goes.”[i] Plath struggled with this feeling of sorrow and depression that wouldn’t leave her and a big part of her struggle was in making choices about life.
In her novel, The Bell Jar, the main character, Esther, faces this same kind of paralysis. In the pages of this book, Plath paints a beautiful picture out of words of this type of inability to choose,
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.[ii]
Esther is forced into a state of waiting. And the way that she sees it, the longer she waits out of fear of choosing wrongly, the less options she will eventually have. Choices, so many choices are offered, but as time goes on, options are stripped away.
This is the world that we live in. A world of choice and paralysis of choice. So, how do we combat this immobility?
I don’t know.
Seriously, I’m not exactly sure how we can combat immobility of choice in a world that is only going to end up offering more and more choices as time goes on. Soon, 20 flavors of ice cream in one shop won’t seem like enough. 30 flavors are not enough. And so on and so forth as time goes on. Humanity struggles with being content when the world caters so often to the wants of man.
So, what do we do about it? I’m not sure. But let me explain my own experiences and we can see if that helps a little bit.
Contentedness is hard to find in this world. When we are always given new and better things and when we are offered more stuff all the time, it makes it hard to be content with what you have. But that is a lot easier when your content with who you are. When you are not battling the war of finding your identity, it is easier to have contentedness in life.
And who am I? For me, I am a Christian and I fully believe that my identity is not my own, but my identity is in Christ. This does not mean that I never struggle with who I am or that I am always content. But in a world of never-ending attempts to be satisfied by material things, I have found a level of peace in God. But one of the greatest parts of finding identity in Christ includes allowing your life to be used for whatever purpose God calls you to. It may not be a specific calling, all the time, like “be a pastor,” but He definitely will guide you in life’s journey if you walk faithfully alongside him. You’ll still have to pick your ice cream flavor, but in trusting God to direct your steps and being content in who you are in Christ, life is made easier and a lot more stress-free. This type of lifestyle removes some of that fear that so often paralyzes individuals.
I don’t know whether Sylvia Plath’s life would have ended differently had she been a Christian, but I do believe she would have been less afflicted by the amount of pressure that she faced throughout her life.
Having more choices seems like such a good part of life in a technologically advancing world, but that’s the paradoxical nature of multiplicity of choice: more choices lead to more personal affliction over what to choose. There will always be too many flavors of ice cream to choose from. But the good news is that such immobility is limited when one turns to God instead of relying on oneself to always make another decision.
[i] The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. By Karen V. Kukil (Anchor Books, New York: 2000),
[ii] Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (HarperCollins), 1971, 77.
