Back in the day, we started off with three ice cream flavors: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. But it wasn’t enough. So then we got 31 flavors. But it still wasn’t enough. We moved up to Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs. But it’s still not enough. We demand more choices!
Why Options Do Not Mean Freedom
Options certainly sound like freedom. After all, one can now choose between this or that, or this and these many other things. However freedom is not in the possibilities, it is in the choosing. No freedom exists until one chooses. In fact, prior to choosing, one has nothing at all: none of the choices have moved into reality. Incidentally, having no options is actually more free than having many options, because the single option is already the reality.
We Get to Choose: How Our Perceptions Shape Our Lives
Every one of us can harken back to some pivotal event in our past, likely in early childhood, that determined the trajectory of our life. From that moment, everything turned and faced a certain direction, a direction that we have looked in ever since.
It might have been something dramatic, it could have been tragic, or it could have been unnoticeable by all the other participants in the event even as it engraved our path.