Sunday 28 June 2009

Choices.

I’m sure someone has said once that choice equals freedom but I’d argue that in many cases they equal the opposite.

Trying to buy a bottle of shampoo for example staves any sense of ‘freedom’ from my mind like a drunken sheriff patrolling the perimeter on a penny-farthing firing crazy pistols of doubt and rage: Boots has three shelves of the stuff each boasting a separate magic quality and all assuming knowledge of my scalp I don’t have.

Last time I ran out I popped down the street for five minutes and ended up squandering my entire lunch break stood in the ‘hair products’ aisle with a bottle of Pantene Pro-V for Greasy Hair in one hand and a bottle of Herbal Essences for Straight Hair in the other shaking them like a pair of maracas. To anyone watching I must have resembled a Mexican street entertainer lost in the dreadful realization I had shamed my heritage to chase the tourist dollar moments from finally snapping and impaling myself with them to salvage some spiritual honour.

"Your hair is straight and greasy. Straight AND greasy. And what’s this? I have to consider dandruff too…!?"

In the end I just left. The choice had defeated me.

This is not an isolated example. Smug proclamations are something of a speciality of mine, and those with the dubious honour of being in my company regularly will be familiar with a cycle of worn bullshit that reappears whenever there is some new company I want to impress. One such turgid lump is ‘I’ve never bought a CD in 5 years because the internet lets me listen to whatever I want for free.’

A true post-modern grand narrative that: the internet has revolutionized music, removed the power from the dark corridors of the record companies, made art free, etc., etc. And it’s true: flick on the laptop and straddle the holy trinity of spotify, myspace and youtube and there are very few pieces of recorded music you can’t access.

But where does this boundless universe of choice most regularly lead me? Open-mouthed, frantic-brained paralysis, that's where, a glistening orb of drool formulating beneath eyes fixed on a blank search box. Presented with the option of anything the human mind settles very quickly on nothing.

We need limitations on our choices in order to make them - that is how we work. That’s why we take glee in dwindling our options by process of elimination when presented with a free Sunday afternoon:

‘What shall we do today love?’

‘Well let’s see, transforming into birds of prey and tearing holes through clouds in the midday sun is out, so is travelling back in time to witness the look in Man’s eye at the first accidental spark of fire – come to think of it, I’m pretty skint, how about just a walk in the park??’

Now I’m not advocating a switch to North Korean-style limitations on personal freedom. But it is interesting to reflect that the countries in the world with the worse mental health problems – depression, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders – are also the most ‘developed’ of Western democracies strapped into the rollercoaster of free market capitalism. American rhetoric during the Bush administration and indeed Western dogma since colonial times has been build around another grand narrative: that what would be best for the rest of the world is to become more like us. In most cases, this would mean having more choices.

Now choices like having access to quality health care and education are no-brainers, but does the developing world really envy our hundreds upon hundreds of trainers, or mobile phones, or television evangelists?

In our lip-licking, hand-rubbing sprint to expand our set of choices about what we can buy to wear and eat and been seen with, we’ve trampled on the things that used to matter and that still do in countries we perceive as behind us in history’s long story. Religion, family, community are now unfashionable, marginalized and scorned. We have so much choice about what spiritual path we walk, how much responsibility we take for our families, how we interact with our community that we usually end up doing nothing about them at all. And yet the statistics don’t bear out the idea that we’re happier for it, they suggest that as a population, we’re suffering from deep-set ills of the mind and soul.

I’m hardly the first agitated Westerner to ponder this: a curious solution was put forward by the author George Cockcroft in his cult novel ‘The Dice Man’. The premise is of a doctor who decides one day to make all of his choices by the random will of a dice, thus limiting his options to six at a time and alleviating him of having to make choices. The book descends fairly quickly into a sexual farce but the frustration at the heart of the text is worth paying attention to. Next time I’m buying some shampoo or a t-shirt or some other distraction I may well assign six of them a number, collapse into a lotus position and start rolling out the dice.

I might get escorted out for appearing like a mad man. But then I suspect that’s where all these choices are leading me anyway.

5 comments:

  1. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

    mmmmm choices.... i wonder if our parents realised how debilitating it was to grow up hearing "you can do anything"

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  2. yeah... reminds me of that bit in Fight Club when Brad Pitt talks about how we were all raised to think we'll be rock gods and movie stars and we're slowly realising we're not and we're all really pissed off...

    incidentally, i think i look a bit like pitt in fight club.

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  3. i guess i should probably watch it then.
    thoughts on the TED clip?

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  4. Paralysed by decision = can't decide. Can't decide = it doesn't matter enough for you to decide. Doesn't matter enough = anything'll do. If paralysed, move. Do anything. Pick anything. Pick the nearest to you, pick the alphabetically first, pick the one that's closest in colour to your T-shirt that day. Just pick. And then get paralysed by inability to decide which method to pick to pick.

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  5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/katineblog/2009/feb/27/development

    Jonathan Glennie writes on the different conceptions of development and the drawbacks of our neoliberal, capitalised econocentric societies, which is what you are touching on in the comment on mental health issues.

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