Nice to be back here after a hiatus. These respites, though undesirable somehow become inevitable owing to my losing my mind most of the time, slothfulness, creative void etc etc. For quite sometime, I have been thinking about what to write and a lot of times, I would get some mediocre topic to ramble about, but I would be discouraged when the thought of some of my friends saying - you can blog, but you can't talk to me, come to my mind, considering my shutting off from social communications altogether because of reasons I am unable to make people understand. So I decided to write about depression. I even managed to write a really long article on depression, but I could not bring myself to posting it here. So, then I said to myself, what the heck, I feel like writing today and I am just going to do it. Anyway that concludes my bullshit of excuses for not writing for quite sometime and below is what I really wanted to write about.
I have been meaning to write about choices for a long time. But a video on TED.com ignited my figment of imagination today. Choices - There has always been a prevalent school of thought about how choices are boons. Now as we are getting richer and developing more and more, the choices we are enjoying in our lives are increasing as well. Choices are a mark of the freedom we enjoy. Be it anything, the people we choose to be with, jobs, the clothes we wear etc to even the type of trash bags we want to use, we have so many number of choices. We could make choices and live a better life, a life we probably would be really happy about because we choose what we liked and if we feel we didn't, we choose something else. Choices bring us the flexibility to do what we like the way we want. Choices help us get the best. They make us feel powerful and boosts our ego.
However, this is not really true. There are several demerits of choices. Choices bring with them a lot of confusion. With more choices, we have more difficulty in decision making. With so many choices that we have, we get overwhelmed, while one moment we choose something and then at some point, we regret the choice and try to go for the next choice. But I think the biggest problem with choices is the fact that it raises expectations. However we have to keep in mind that there are still parts of the world where there are almost no choices just like olden times. Anyway considering people who have a lot of choices - they slowly begin expecting more. More expectations lead to less satisfaction which leads to depression eventually. So take the example of astrologers. We expect to know everything about the future, so we could supposedly conquer it. We go to one astrologer and he tells us something, and then we don't get satisfied enough, so we go to another one and then yet another and just yet another. Similarly, we switch jobs because of lack of job satisfaction and I can go on with several other examples. Besides this, when we make wrong choices, we are saddened by consequences of the wrong choices and begin ruing over them. The high expectations that choices instill into us make it difficult to accept failures and we tend to blame ourselves for the failure caused by the wrong choice we made which makes sense but doesn't really help us. Our quest for perfection leaves us completely dissatisfied with ourselves as we become more and more cupid and the quest never ends.
So while choices give us the freedom to choose what we like, choices also bring confusion and increased expectations leading to dissatisfaction and sadness eventually. Think of people who don't have any choices, they are going to try to make the best out of what they have. They would possess the gift of being able to be happy with what they have and get, instead of going on a quest for happiness. I don't mean to say that we should not have any choices at all. I think we should have enough choices to keep us happy and that we have gone past the point where we have those enough number of choices and instead we are flooded with choices. Choices are definitely challenging our decision making abilities. I would write in another blog post about choices again but in a slightly different context.
Labels: Choices